”“VoIP was not my main business, and when the service I was using went down for weeks, I felt like I was left without support or options for my clients. After working with 14IP, I am more confident in serving my existing customers and expanding my voice client base. 14IP offered me the support and service I needed when it mattered most. They earned my trust and a partner for life.”
Zach RodgersBusiness Owner, Georgia
”“Part of the reason I originally collaborated on FreePBX® was to help people with an affordable alternative to big phone companies that treated small business customers as if it did not matter. It’s similar to the reason I joined 14P. We (The 14P Team) want to make a difference in the telecom world, and helping small businesses and partners with reliable, secure products and top-tier support is a big part of that.”
Rob ThomasSenior Software Engineer - 14IP
Our Customer
Revolt Voice & PC
A small business focused on IT and VoIP sees high demand for secure and reliable SIP Trunking. Zach Rodgers, the owner of ‘Revolt Voice & PC’ located in Winder, in the US State of Georgia, supports businesses in Information Technology and Voice Platforms. Zach’s career started as a specialist in IT infrastructure design, service, and support for small and medium businesses. And much like most telecom experts, he fell into the telecom industry after several requests from his IT customers looking for a phone system upgrade. Moving into VoIP was only natural, as often the case with IT experts, as voice communications now rely heavily on network infrastructure, bandwidth, and quality-of-service. The company began taking on VoIP clients by offering telecom services to a handful of its existing IT clients.
With some experience maintaining a 3CX VoIP system at a previous workplace, the owner started seeking a VoIP Platform that offered the features and functionality their clients needed. Most of their customers had old on-premise Nortel PBX’s with analog line services. Initially, as a side project, the owner fired up a fully remote VoIP system, IP desk phones connected to their existing analog line services. After proving the platform to be secure and reliable, they moved their first customer and decommissioned the Nortel PBX. The rest is history, that is until the next stage, which was phasing out their analog lines and transitioning the customers to SIP Trunking.
Business Challenges
SIP Trunking brought a whole new equation to the mix of new technology for their customers. They started with a large customer supported on a VoIP platform with another provider’s sip trunks. Once proven dependable and offering significant cost savings, one by one, they moved all their customers over to sip trunks. It was an enormous undertaking as several of these customers had POTs lines for voice, fax, point-of-sale, etc. So getting all the numbers organized for porting with supporting phone bills from various carriers was no easy task. Eventually, they established all their customers on a provider’s sip trunks, which alleviated the inflexibility and monthly overhead costs with antiquated analog lines.
Things were running smoothly up until mid-September 2021. Suddenly their client base started to experience issues with inbound and outbound calls. In panic mode, as with any telecom provider, when services are interrupted, they started troubleshooting. They could not reach their existing SIP Trunking provider to determine if this was a global outage. The provider only offered client support via online chat, making it impossible to get support or troubleshoot. Fortunately, Zach happened across a FreePBX® social media forum, where he met Rob Thomas of 14IP, an original collaborator of FreePBX®. Rob was assisting FreePBX® System Administrators and Customers experiencing the same outages with an alternative solution. Rob confirmed that the SIP Trunking vendor was experiencing a major global outage, causing thousands of businesses to be out of service for several weeks, leaving businesses stranded, unable to make or receive calls. An introduction was made for the company to 14IP, and the conversations began on a SIP Trunking migration project.
The Solution by 14IP
Time was a critical factor, and their clients were without phone service going on weeks. Once contact was established with 14IP, things moved quickly, and the process of switching to 14IP SIP trunks commenced. 14IP offered a 5-7 day porting turnaround with back-end automation and live updates from the losing carrier.
14IP SIP Trunking was introduced as a Managed Solution that would offer the tools the organization wanted, along with the security required by the organization—complemented by a flawless and fast installation offered with the utilization of Cloud Device Manager (CDM).
The Results
There were a few select employees that requested unique key set-ups. Those few exceptions could be configured without having to make a change to the CDM template.
Employee Engagement was enhanced with 14IP’s Clearly Cloud Video Conference solution and Call Panel. These solutions allowed knowledge and collaboration to meet for total synchronicity between customers and staff. Teams and individuals could work and meet from anywhere using 14IP CIP desk phones and Clearly Anywhere mobile and desktop softphones, increasing productivity. The platform offers the overall security that can be customized down to the individual.
All of this was accomplished in a couple of weeks, and all clients were back up and running within two to three weeks. With the crisis averted, and a new and improved solution in place, the owner was free to expand their VoIP service and take on new clients with the secure feeling of working with a secure and redundant platform.
