Hosted PBX Guide

Who’s Gizmo? That’s the first question I had when I found out that Virtual PBX had teamed up with them to provide phone service.  Short answer: The guys who can give you free phone service.

As you might know, Virtual PBX provides a hosted PBX service – they take and process your calls, then send them to your existing phones. But that still means you have to pay for the phones themselves. Now, they’ve tracked down a provider called Gizmo that lets you run a “phone line” program off your computer. You can take and place calls on your computer, or set their service up on an IP phone that connects via Ethernet to take calls.

So, that’s nothing new on its own. Ringcentral has a ‘digital line’ phone service that works basically the same way, and 8x8 or Vocalocity provide a combined PBX/phone system. I’ve never generally been impressed with these – you pay $20-40 per line for mediocre quality phones. Just get Skype, right?

That’s pretty much what they did. I toyed around with Gizmo a bit. I’ve seen software-phones before, and I’ve seen instant messengers, and I’ve seen voice over internet. But Gizmo fills a special niche – it combines smoothly with a PBX, and costs nothing to set up an account and take calls.

Virtual PBX has capitalized on this by figuring out some way to handle and process the calls going to Gizmo phones such that they offer a special Gizmo-only service plan that provides unlimited service for $50/month. Gizmo on its own is neat to combine with Virtual PBX, since it’s a free phone on your computer. Unlimited inbound on your business number? That’s just amazing. But…

Downsides. Okay, Gizmo charges 2 cents per minute on outbound calls. So if you’re doing a lot of those, you’d need to have a Gizmo phone and an unlimited outbound line for everyone. And that can get a bit ridiculous. On the other hand, if your outbound is limited, it’s way better to have to pay 2 cents a minute instead of $40/month. The second downside is, well, the unlimited minute thing doesn’t work for toll-free numbers. Yeah, I know, I was disappointed too. But they still bring costs down to 2.9 cents per minute, and that’s pretty handy for high-volume customers.

So, in the end? It’s a neat extra thing you can do to wire your company up, or try to cut costs. And depending on the kind of business you run, you could save hundreds of dollars per month. That adds up fast. But it isn’t for everyone. Check out their website for yourself to get more info.

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