8×8 Hosted PBX

A while ago, I mentioned toying around with the VoIP system from 8×8. Well, I’m at it again and I must say that I like this system. As far as the voice over IP solutions go, their offer is one of the cheaper, and least problematic ones.

I mean, let’s face it – when you are in business for internet based phone system it is not because of the robustness or quality. You just don’t want the hassle and the expense of installing a real, physical, copper based PBX. It’s expensive, requires hardware, on site installation and etc. You’d think that you could skip all of that if you just make the jump to VoIP. But no. Most of the time when you try to buy a VoIP phone system like that you get a visit from a dude with a huge briefcase that hosts a router, mini switch, and a bulky black box. They guy makes a demo, explaining the magic enclosed inside of that box makes their system the best thing ever. It probably is, but that’s not necessarily what I need.

All I want is a phone that I can put on my desk, plug into the neares ethernet port and dial a number. That’s exactly what 8×8 is offering. I’m sure there are other systems like that out there, but that’s the one I ended up with, so it’s the one I’m reviewing.

And yeah – surprisingly it’s that easy. You can take a phone, plug it virtually anywhere and it works. All the configuration is done via 8×8 website. You log in, manage your extensions, ring groups, the auto-attendant, voice mail and all that good stuff. You can set up, and deploy this system at a small office in 15-20 minutes, assuming that your are already wired for internet access. Most of the settings can be changed on the fly (not all though) and the system has a ton of features revolving around call forwarding, sharing lines and etc.

Here is the killer feature that makes this system great for little start ups which don’t actually have an actual office. You know the type – it’s you and 3 other dudes working out of your basements. You can get an 8×8 phone for each of them, plop it on their desk and it will actually behave as if you had a real phone system. You can dial your buddies via extension, use the intercom feature to tell them to stop watching pr0n and get back to work and etc. Better yet, anyone calling from the outside will probably think you are all sitting in one room somewhere – while in reality you can be in different states.

There is also a fail over feature that will attempt to route the call to your cell phone, home phone or whatever number you set it up with if you can’t pick it up. You can set up several numbers and the system will try them all in a sequence or simultaneously (depending on your preference). It’s all configurable from the website so if your office explodes due to a red Swingline stapler dispute you can reroute all the calls to another phone from just about anywhere.

Another neat feature is that all the voicemails can be sent to your email as wav files. So you can listen to them from anywhere at any time even if you don’t have access to your phone. You can also, for example, forward a given voicemail message to someone which is even more awesome.

The auto attendant feature is great. You can actually build multi-tier dial by number menu. So when someone calls in you can ask them to press a 0-9 number. You can set up a sub-menu under each of these numbers with it’s own voice recording, and sub-sub menus. You can also enable direct dialing by extension, or use the built in “company directory” that allows the caller to search the person they want to speak to by name.

It’s not all good though. Their online user interface looks like it was made in the early 90’s – it is ugly, clunky and seems to be a bit confused as to how you actually use asynchronous javascript in the Web 2.0 era. It usually makes 2-3 synchronous javascript calls in the background (while it flashes “Processing…” in the foreground) and then redirects you or reloads the page. I don’t get this – either to asynchronous background calls or redirect – doing both is just weird.

They have no mobile support so the site looks like absolute shit on my blackberry and is only halfway functional. Which is stupid. If your network goes down, a mobile phone might be your only way of reconfiguring the phones to use alternate numbers. But with the way the whole site was designed I’m actually glad it works in Firefox.

Some parts of the interface are just awkward and unwieldy. For example, to register a phone with your account and associate it with an extension you have to type in it’s mac address (found on a sticker on the back of the device) into a text box. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure you could probably devise a more convenient method of doing this.

Also there is no going back. You can’t un-register a phone. If you want to swap it for another device you have to go through the 8×8 Tech Support. I found that to be rather inconvenient. Perhaps they do it to prevent users from gaming their system but I really don’t see how could someone use the ability to swap devices to abuse their network. Go figure.

Similarly, once you assign a number to an extension you can’t change it yourself. If you move, and want to get a new local number, you have to call support. That I understand – still, there should be at least a one-time allowance for “Oops, my mouse has slipped and I actually really hate my new number” type of situations.

More shitty things about the system: there is a bit of lag when you dial out. Apparently this is due to the fact that the phone needs to establish a connection with the server first. This can take anywhere from 1 up to 5 seconds. And yes, it happens even on FiOS and even for local extensions. Remember, there is no local hardware box and therefore there is no such thing as a “local” with this system. Everything is routed through their central servers. That’s just how it works.

Also every once in a while you may have static on the line, or dropped connection. I experienced that both on cable and on FiOS but it’s an intermittent problem and it’s hard to pin down. I think this usually happens during big traffic spikes with a lot of people talking on the phones, uploading and downloading files. I’m chalking it down to an over saturated connection since I’ve talked to some other people using this system and not getting any dropped calls.

Each phone has a local phone book where you can put in numbers and names of people you call frequently. This is in addition to the Caller ID and will usually override it. It’s great for storing peoples cell phones or “tagging” unlisted numbers and can be used as an extended speed dial. There is a way to export the whole phone book to a .csv file, but no way to import it back which is retarded. There is also no way to edit the book via the web interface. So if you want everyone across the whole company have the same numbers coded in, someone will have to go and manually punch them in on each phone. The import feature is supposedly in the works – or so I was told by the tech support people. But if you have a need for this type of feature, and need to push out phone books to all your company phones stay away.

Then there is the thing ring groups. It seems that 8×8 people have a very specific idea as to how their phones should be used – and deviating from their formula is nearly impossible. 8×8 wants everyone to have a dedicated extension. If you are running a call center you can create so called “ring groups” which have their own extension and shared voice mail. Each group can be set up with a list of extensions and will either ring on them simultaneously or in a sequence (you get to choose). There is also something called a “shared line” – which is a virtual extension that can be set to ring on several phones but it costs around $20 more than a regular line.

What you can’t do is this: “If someone calls phone A, make it ring on phone B, C and D as well and allow any of them to pick up the call”. There is just no way to do this. Why would you need such a thing? Well, let me give you a real life scenario: let’s say you have a very important dude with a corner office – let’s call him Mr. Andrew Ryan. You know – he is the kind of guy who has a putting mat by the window and he practices his golf strokes while he is on the conference call. He does hostile takeovers every Thursday, and on Sundays he is building some off shore undersea utopia or something. Anyways, everyone knows that a guy with a putting mat is way to important to answer his phone directly – unless of course the phone call is from another VIP with a putting mat. So for example if Mr. Fontaine is on the phone, he wants to be able to answer directly. All other times, he wants one of his secretaries to field the call and make the caller wait an obligatory 5-10 minutes on hold.

This seems to be a fairly straightforward request, no? Make the line ring on 3 different extensions. And yet there is no way to do this with the 8×8 system. It’s impossible. You can’t do it with ring groups, and you can’t do it with the shared line.

I spent hours and hours on the phone with tech support and the all tell me it can’t be done. An approximate solution is to set up a ring group and then forward Mr. Ryan’s call to the group after initial 1-2 rings. If no one picks up, the call will land in the ring groups shared voicemail which is problematic. For example, Mr. Ryan doesn’t want his secretary to listen to his exchanges with Mr. Fontaine. The logical thing would be to send the call back to Ryans voice mail. But that can’t be done – you can only forward the call to another extension. So the only thing you can do is to route the call back to Ryan’s phone which creates an endless loop – the phone will simply ring forever. When Mr. Ryan leaves the office he must remember to set his phone to “Do Not Disturb” mode which overrides the ring group settings and sends all calls directly to voice mail. But let’s face it – if you are a guy who is building a secret undersea city little things like pushing the DnD button on your phone will likely slip your mind.

The upside of this is that their support group seems to be fairly competent. They know the system well and they actually speak English. Yeah, I was surprised too, but every time I called them, I was able to get actual assistance rather than the usual stalling for time, and fumbling through the manual. The do that stupid performance survey thing, and ask you if you are satisfied with their service at the end of each call which is annoying.

It seems that they do take customer requests and complaints seriously. For example, when I canceled my initial trial I told them it was because they didn’t have a “transfer to voice mail” feature. I made multiple calls to their tech support and spent countless hours talking to their system specialists trying to get a workable solution – with no results. Curiously enough, my current phone does have that feature – it is a soft function that can be invoked from an expandable menu while you are on the call. Weird, huh?

None of the 8×8 manuals even mentions this feature but it is there. I could have sworn it was not around when I tested the phones for the first time. So either they added it in the meantime due to customer complaints, or I over-estimated the effectiveness of their support and the drones I talked to back then were just too dumb and too uninformed to actually find it.

One more thing – don’t try to actually use the phone if you have no internet connection or your network requires a static IP. If the device can’t grab DHCP address it will sit there for around 15 minutes until it will actually allow you to skip to the next up step. After DHCP it will try to check for updates, which will take another 15 minutes if it can’t establish an internet connection. Your best bet is to unplug it from the network completely, let it boot up, change the IP settings and then plug it in. If it detects a network beat it will keep trying to connect even if the DHCP server ignores it, and even if it gets a fake IP.

So let’s summarize it:

The Pros: cheap, idiot friendly setup (even a caveman can do it), plug it anywhere and it works, great auto-attendant, nice forwarding options, voice mail can be sent to your email as a wav file, decent support

The Cons: ancient looking, web 1.0 interface, no support for mobile browsers (eg. blackberry), missing features such as transferring ring group call to someones voicemail if no one picks up or an import feature for the phone book, dial out lag, it takes about an hour to boot up if it can’t get an IP address right away. And if you are a bigger organization, you should probably think of putting the phones on a dedicated bonded T1 connection or something with even higher bandwidth to avoid occasional hiccups, static and call drops.

All in all, I like it. Despite it’s flaws it’s a decent system. If I was opening a startup tomorrow, I’d probably get a few of these phones to act as a voice communication hub for the company.

As usual – comments are appreciated. If you know better solutions with similar scope, I’d love to hear about them.

Oh, and I do realize this post is a bit dry and a bit off topic for this blog. I hardly ever review stuff like this. But, I figured I might as well post it.