Fonality

Honestly, if you're a company with a good, reliable standard PBX system and you're thinking of making the move to VoIP primarily to save money? I'd recommend you think long and hard before switching. As an I.T. professional with 20+ years of experience, I've heard so much hype and pressure applied to move everyone to VoIP. "It's the future!", they all say, and they tout the flexibility and features, plus the claimed cost savings.

Well, you get what you pay for with this stuff. Our company runs both Fonality and a regular PBX using a dedicated T1 circuit in tandem right now. Fonality certainly winds up costing less, and that's ultimately why we'll likely end up 100% moved over to it, within the next year or two.

Unfortunately, we have far more issues with calls not completing correctly and calls dropping than we ever have on the regular PBX system. I'd say at least twice a day, in our small office, someone complains they dialed an extension and heard only strange noises or clicks on their end of the line (even if it rang on the other end). Fonality generally likes to write this off as "bandwidth issues" when questioned about it, yet we're on a 50mbit cable modem connection that consistently checks out as giving us at least what we pay for in upload/download speeds.

Fonality's HUD software is another regular source of frustration. Because it really makes such things as multi-party conferencing easier, as well as giving a visual phone directory that lets you view at a glance if someone is actually in a call, people tend to rely on it as though their phone wasn't usable without it. Unfortunately, it's far from being as reliable as the phone itself. For example, the Mac OS X version has a number of issues running properly right now if you're on the latest version of Java 7. And I've regularly had problems with users of the Windows version where the software just quits launching. You click on it and it acts like it's going to run for maybe 2-3 seconds and closes down. A full uninstall and reinstall doesn't fix it. (Not even sure what causes this, although I'm starting to guess it may be related to people with multiple monitor setups with portable computers. If they have the HUD running on a 2nd. or 3rd. display and then sleep or shut down the laptop and take it someplace -- using it where the extra displays aren't attached, it may get the HUD software confused?)

And as others have noted, tech. support is spotty at best. We've occasionally had problems where settings we made to our configuration were lost or reverted to older ones after the Fonality server required a reboot to fix an outage or other issues. We eventually found out Fonality synchronizes those settings with other servers in multiple geographic regions and sometimes, that synchronization seems to fail on their end (often not even getting noticed for weeks at a time, until someone calls in with an issue of lost settings like we've had). I've put in tickets that didn't even get a reply for 24 hours or more, followed by a brief and unacceptable answer. The only good resolution came about with phone calls to high up heads of divisions within Fonality, who'd wind up apologizing to us and getting things fixed very quickly (until the next issue).

All in all, I like a lot of the functionality Fonality tries to offer and the pricing is good. But I can't really recommend them to companies who rely a lot on their telephones and use a lot of the advanced features (conference bridges especially). It will result in a lot of frustration, especially with salespeople trying to do business by phone all day long.