NetFortris Reviews

I bought my first Fonality system in late 2006 and it was up and running in early 2007. We picked it because we just didn’t see anything else out there that had the features.  We knew we were taking a chance on a fairly young company, but they did not disappoint.  There were some minor installation issues, but their support was some of the best I have every experienced - a team of experienced guys that really seemed to like helping and fixing problems.
Over the past 5 years I have installed two more at other offices, and linked them to the HQ server.  And I also provide support for another Fonality server at a very large church nearby. 
I am very aware of the growing pains that Fonality has had over the past couple of years.  They have built a support office in the Philippines and also moved some of their offices from Los Angeles to somewhere in Texas.  Some of these changes were supposed to improve support and service, but they were late in coming and had a rough start. I have made my dissatisfaction known over this period and Fonality has been very receptive and have done a good job in communicating to me what they are  doing to fix these issues. I do see some significant improvements. They know they have a lot of work to do to restore the trust from their customer base.
Regarding the system itself, I have had only one significant outage of the years on all the systems I manage.  And Fonality support was able to restore service within the hour for that event.
The system has been quite reliable, and the biggest issues we have faced have been regarding better network management. We have a call center in the Philippines with 30 people and have had to make some changes in our bandwidth management and internet provider to achieve reliable results.
Users love the features, and how accessible these features are, mostly using the HUD interface. I train new users on the phone system and they usually are stunned at how intuitive and easy it is to understand and learn.
The control panel is sometimes slow to respond, but it has never kept me from getting things done.
All in all, I think Fonality is a good company, and they make a good product. I would (and have on several occasions) recommend Fonality to friends.

In the beginning we really liked Fonality, but same as with the reviews below, we are experiencing daily issues with service now. It is completely unrelaiable. The last few tickets we opened they requested that we restart our network...that is just not asuitable answer. We are dumping them for ring centra as soon as I can get the budget approved. Stay away from these guys. The second they get your money, they don't care about you.

I signed my business up for Fonality about six months ago, and the problems are still ongoing.
First it was the softphones. We set up our system with the router and dedicated VOIP bandwidth that Fonality recommended, got blazing fast internet, used their phones and had their techs walk us through installing the HUD. Still, for the first couple months we had problems with the phones taking 2-10min to dial out and the HUD consistently crashing, which was painful since we're trying to launch a call center. When we contacted their tech support it took us at least a dozen phone calls to get absolutely nowhere, but we kept pressing until we got someone on the line who claimed to be the head of the tech dept. After explaining our issues and going over the details of our system, he told us he'd get back to us, "...after I google it." So here we are, three months into starting our business and unable to hire anybody b/c our phones don't work.
Tech support never got back to us, we fixed the problem ourselves (turns out we're better at Googling things than an IT professional).
To compensate for the problems, Fonality agreed to let us slide on the monthly payments for the months that the service didn't work. Sounds good, right? Sure did. Then, several months later, without making prior contact aside from a "miscommunication" that told us our balance was covered, we get an email informing us that our latest charge didn't go through. We called in to fix the problem and were informed that we were being retro-actively charged for past months - months that we were told we were getting comped. Unfortunately we never received a written detail of what we were getting (or any other helpful correspondence), so they took us for all they could get. The only thing they did right was offer to cancel our contract, which does me no good b/c my business relies 100% on our phones. Needless to say I'm looking for another provider.
Cliff notes: Poor tech support, ripped us off hundreds of dollars without notice and chalked it up to a "miscommunication", were unwilling to bite the bullet on their numerous mistakes, even though they acknowledged them.

I have been in the communications / technology industry for 15 years and have an extensive background in telecommunications.  I had a customer (school district) who’s 3Com NBX had been hit by lightning and had to be replaced.  This was in the fall of 2010.  At that time, I was an Avaya dealer, but was looking for a different solution for my customers.  I first heard of Fonality thru my Dell rep (I am also a Dell reseller/partner).  I needed a solution quick since this customer was without a phone system.  I called up Fonality and spoke with a sales rep who quoted me a system.  The customer had their own analog trunks so we only needed the system and not any voice services.  The total system cost plus 58 Polycom IP phones was around $30,000.00.  I was NOT told up front that in order to configure your system, you must connect to Fonality’s Cloud and cannot connect directly to the local PBX server to config, nor was I told up front about the extremely expensive annual support.  And if you do not pay for the annual support, you’re screwed if you have a problem.  I was under the impression we could pay per hour if we ever needed support after the 1^st year of included support, but I was wrong.  After the initial install, which was super slow due to the extremely slow response of Fonality’s Control Panel, we had several instances of not being able to make or receive calls.  Again, this system was connected to the customer’s own local analog trunks and not hosted SIP trunks.  So the problem each time was with the server’s corrupted config files.  And, each time, calling Fonality’s Tech Support was a joke.  It would take a 30-45 minute hold each time or I would have to leave my name & number and wait for a call back.  Finally, after about 3-4 months from the date of the install, the system seemed to stabilize.  Then, when it came time for the annual support to renew, they automatically charged $ 3,100.00 to the same credit card that was used to purchase the system without any warning or email notification.  Once that was reversed, they contacted me and basically told me that if I didn’t pay for the annual support, I would be sorry.  Well, finally today (1/20/2012), I was sorry.  The system would not make or receive calls and when I logged into the control panel, I got an error that said “your system cannot start due to an error in the Zapata.config or zaptel.config”.  And even though we bought & paid for the system, Fonality does NOT give you access to correct these kinds of issues yourself.  These can only be corrected thru their tech support which we could not talk to unless we paid the $ 3,800.00 annual support (an additional $750 for a 1 time activation fee since we let the support lapse).  To make an even longer story short, we paid them the $ 3,800.00, and then called their tech support which had it fixed in 2 minutes.

I don’t like the fact that Fonality forces you to pay for annual support even though we paid $ 30,000.00 for a phone system.  I don’t like their slow web control panel and I don’t like their tech support.  The customer (school district) is having me yank out the system this summer and replace it with an NEC.