The year of the hosted PBX

So I have Verizon FiOS at home for more than half a year now. For those who are not familiar with that offering: This is a triple-play solution with TV, Internet and phone which comes to my home over a fiber. TV works beautifully, we can enjoy video on demand and the phone includes a flat rate for domestic (US) calls.

The phone service comes “of course” in the form of a analog telephone line. That part is disappointing. So they dig a fiber to my home, all just to convert everything into analog and then back to digital (practically all phones are digital today anyway)? That’s stupid. Anyway, still understandable because my home has an analog telephone line in each room, and typical Verizon customers don’t like to rip this out of the wall and replace it with Ethernet. So do I. What I did was getting a cheap analog DECT handset and connected to the line in the basement. All the telephone lines are useless in my house. DECT goes through walls.

But of course that’s not all. Guess what, I also have a couple of m9 handsets in my house.

They are registered to various locations. Practically for all snom offices, I have a registration. Some of the registrations are even using Lync; others are using snom ONE. My home deployment even stands the “wife test”: She actually uses it. If I would count the minutes, I would actually say that she uses the m9 more than the analog DECT line. Number one on her telephone usage list is the cell phone, no surprises here.

Anyway, the surprising thing is that the voice quality for our VoIP at home service is out of question rock solid. I should have started measuring the QoS reports, but it feels like we never missed a single packet. FiOS has a large upload capacity (a few MBit per second), which is a problem in other installations where uploading data has only very limited bandwidth. I think that is the difference to the situation a few years ago. People were dreaming about hosted PBX, and the concept hade a lot of sense; but the bandwidth was simply not widely available. That has changed.as the Apple folks would say “the times, they are changing”.

Essentially I am a user of hosted PBX with the snom m9. It works great, and it makes a lot of sense. This is something people will find out this year.