I need some help everyone. Here's my situation, we have 5 employees in my company, plus 4 extra extensions for conference room etc. We're ditching our Hosted PBX for asterisk. Our hosted pbx does 5 concurrent channels, and I just ordered 4 analog lines from my telco to use with my TDM410. I signed up for a phone number with CallCentric to try out VoIP and the calls are amazingly clear. With the TDM410 the calls are so staticy, but sound great to the person I'm calling. I've done tons of troubleshooting but its still not as good as the quality with Callcentric.

The problem it seems is that Callcentric supports 1 concurrent call, and it doesn't support hunting.

I need a VoIP provider that will basically let me have 1 main number, that will support at least 4 concurrent calls on it to match the 4 analog lines that I have. I'd prefer somewhere as well that would let me add more channels later if I found that I needed say 5 or 6.

It's really hard to find providers that work well with Asterisk so hoping to get some suggestions. A lot seem to be US only and I need a local Toronto 416 number. Thanks!

One solution would be to get your DID's from MyDivert.com
They supply 2 channels per DID, BUT truth be known if you buy more DID's they tend to share all the channels.
Thus if you buy 2 DID's and only use one it should have 4 channels
This of course assumes your DID's are in the same area of the world as there seems to be 2 areas that don't share channels...
This is what I do and it seems to work just fine.
This kind of behavior with DID's is documented by some other providers. ie. Terrasip

Thanks for your reply. I had an account with voip.ms before but it didn't work well on my softphone. I just tried it again and the quality was great and they give unlimited call channels per DID. The only thing is I didn't realize that VoIP for business seems to bill by the second. We do a LOT of talking and when I did my calculations it works out to something like $360 for a month where my 4 phone analog lines are only $127.50. I really liked callcentric as well but it's also per second billing for outbound calls which is too bad.

You could also check out FREEPHONELINE.CA
They are totally free for certain provinces like Ontario or unlimited for $3.50 a month for both incoming and outgoing.
They will sell the settings to use with a PBX for $50 one time charge.

Voip.ms rates (Very good quality and service, been using for over a year)

Toronto $0.99 per month / $0.0100 per minute

$360.00 / .01 =36000 mins / 30 days = 1200mins a day / 4 phone lines =300 mins per line per day / 60 mins in a hour = 5 hrs per phone line per day

this does not allow for lunch or weekends at a typical business.
Are you running a call centre with just local calls?

The price is only .01 a minute billed in 6 sec increments.

THIS ONLY APPLIES TO INCOMING CALLS OUTGOING IS A DIFFERENT PRICE.

On my 800 number it is PREMIUM is .0125
Value is Canada .0052 US .0105

As for freephoneline.ca they do not support business and would disconnect you for that kind of usage. (Their parent company would be more than happy to provide a solution though)

Other then Voip.ms in Canada their is Les.net, my experience has been less then stellar though. Have not tried voicemeup.com but it looks like they bill in Canadian currency too. (I'm able to get a local number from them)

Well I myself only charge 0.9 cents min in Canada
I use Gafachi as one of my outgoing providers they are 0.035 cents per min in Canada

Want any more of my secretes?

I like voip.ms but this is a small call centre and outbound centre. Like we do direct mailings and do cold calling as well. The thing is 4 phone lines with Allstream is $127.50 and has 1000 mins of LD free, we call all over Canada. Every 2 lines is $63.75 with 500 NA long distance mins. So going to voip would have to be the same price or cheaper to make it worth it. I more liked it because it's much clearer than DAHDI but still tweaking that, spent all day trying to get my analog lines to sound as good as Voip, pain in the you know what.

You could also check out Terrasip for callcenter stuff they are very cheap.
both gafachi and terrasip would save a fortune over voip.ms and there are even cheaper providers out there you just need to have a high volume like you do...

One of us is not understanding the other, I'll take the hit for that

$127.50 - $.099 for a DID which is not actually needed if there is no incoming calls.

Leaves $125.00 for channel use. (like my math)

125/.0052 = 24,038 mins per $125.00 value route. That is 24 times more minutes in North America with unlimited channels.

OR

125/.0125 =10,000 mins per $125.00 on the Premium route 10 times more mins on unlimited channels.

The beauty about voip is that it can grow with you and you have complete control, voip.ms makes it easy for you.

Now saying all that for business, nothing beats PSTN for dependability, and I believe in your situation you could/should have both.

Right I understand what you're saying. For the $127.50 though all local calls are of course free, all toll free calls are free, all North American calls I get 1000 mins free per month at 3 cents for each additional minute. We do equal amounts of inbound and outbound that's the thing. Our toll free numbers are free with Allstream (I have 5 all free and they all use the 1000 free mins as well, then 3 cents a min after that). So the thing is if each of the 5 employees does a total of 6 hours of calls per day (mix of in and out) then that's 30 hours a day x 5 x 4 = 600 hours per month or 36,000 mins. At the value offering that's 36,000 x 0.0052 $187.20 which isn't horrible, but gets me concerned with quality so I'd probably want the premium one which is then $450.

And actually after writing all that I think I may have just realized the value of voip now. Right now we do around 1500 mins of LD per month the rest are local or inbound toll free, and each person is maybe on the phone for 1 hour a day maybe 2 if really busy. We're ramping up the team and want it to be much higher volume so that's where we got the 6 hours per person a day from. Being 30 hours a day and servicing all of Canada, a lot of those calls will be long distance or toll free inbound. 36,000 mins is a lot, subtract the 1000 free ones, that's 35,000 minutes per month. Even if 10,000 of them is LD that's 10,000 x 0.03 = $300 plus the $127.50 or $427.50.

Now I have to reconsider everything lol. My only thing is with toll free voip.ms seems more expensive, like it said 3.2 cents per minute, is that on top of the 0.0052 or 0.0125 normal rate or just 3.2 flat?