I’ve been using Blueface as my personal VoIP provider for the last four years, however I waited until two weeks ago to finally switch WhatClinic.com over to their Business Plus account, migrating from another well known VoIP provider.
Blueface has been in the personal VoIP market for about 5 years but despite having had something of a business offering it only seems to have really started to make progress with businesses accounts during the last 12 months.
I had been meaning to move the WhatClinic.com account for a while as we’d been experiencing intermittent quality problems with our previous VoIP provider resulting in the sales team loosing trust with them and using Skype in preference.
Setup
The setup was quick and easy and completed over the web without the need to talk to anyone in Blueface. It was easy to assign phone numbers to SIP accounts and setup the voicemail. Initially our account only came with four SIP addresses, which seemed a bit odd as it had 8 phone numbers. An email to their support department sorted this out 12 hours later at no extra charge.
We use SMON 320 phones and initially we could only make outgoing calls but not receive incoming calls. A quick look on the Blueface support forums quickly found the solution and we were up and running.
Another problem we ran into was calls were taking up to a minute to initiate, i.e. we would dial a number and it wouldn’t start to ring for up to a minute. This lasted a couple of days and eventually resolved itself without any obvious intervention. I suspect that if we had rebooted our phones it would have sorted the issue immediately.
Self Service
One of the major benefits of Blueface as compared to our previous VoiP provider is their self service interface. This allows us to monitor charges in real time as well as adding new phones and changing voicemail settings. Compared to calling a support line, this is a major time saver and gives us considerably more control. This ease of setup and control means we already have more phones working than we had with our old provider so Blueface is getting more of our business.
Quality
The primary reason we moved provider was because of the intermittent quality of our old setup. As a long term personal user I had high level of confidence that the quality was going to be good, and after two weeks of extensive usage we have found it to be consistently better than either our previous VoIP provider or Skype.
During the two week period we have experienced no quality problems, although like any VoIP provider we expect to have occasional regional outages and have prepared contingency solutions.
Price
The Blueface Business Plus package costs €69 a month and includes 8 direct dial numbers, unlimited UK and Ireland landline calls and 250 mobile minutes. Calls to our international customers are significantly lower than with Skype or our previous VoIP provider on a per minute basis. [It should be noted that Skype have several monthly subscription plans that offer significant savings over their per minute rates.]
Simply put, the price is low enough to make telephony charges to most countries a null issue.
Problems
The phone numbers we were assigned were not all in sequence and neither were our voicemail accounts. It would seem to me that this would be a normal requirement for most businesses and I’m sure I could get it sorted out by contacting Blueface support but I think it should be standard.
Overall
We are very happy so far and I would certainly recommend them based upon our experiences. Having said that we have yet to experience any outage yet and in my experience this is the true acid test of any telecoms provider.
