Some great news from Fonality, an Asterisk-based IP-PBX that earned a very positive review by TMC Labs in the April issue of Internet Telephony Magazine. Last time I checked, they were at 4 million calls last July. Some nice growth there Fonality! Congratulations!
Fonality, the leader in affordable, enterprise-class IP-PBX phone systems for small and medium businesses and the world’s largest distributed deployment of Asterisk™, today announced that users of PBXtra have placed 20 million calls since the product first became available in October 2004. Fonality has deployed PBXtra to more than 10,000 business users domestically and internationally and has a network of 1,200 resellers in 14 countries. Earlier this year, Business 2.0 magazine named Fonality one of “The Next Net 25” – 25 companies helping to reinvent the Web.
“Open Source is really helping us attack an overpriced telephony market with innovative products at the right price,” said Chris Lyman, Fonality’s founder and CEO. “Our growth over the past 18 months demonstrates how hungry SMB owners are for powerful, yet affordable, business phone solutions.”
Unlike most alternative Asterisk-based PBX offerings, PBXtra is more than a simple front-end designed to make it easier for Linux and Asterisk experts to install and manage Asterisk. Fonality has written more than 250,000 lines of code that dramatically streamline the complex tasks of PBX deployment and management. As a result, PBXtra is the world's first true PBX that can be installed and administered remotely using a Web browser, without any specialized training.
PBXtra's enterprise-class features include telecommuting, branch office support, voicemail-to-email, click-to-call, VoIP, softphones, support for IP and analog phones, call recording, distributed call center queuing and more. Businesses deploying PBXtra pay 40 to 80 percent less than they would for a traditional PBX purchase because the software runs on standard PC hardware and uses layers of Open Source Linux and Asterisk software.
PBXtra is available from Fonality or through a Fonality reseller. Pricing starts at $995 for the PBXtra Standard Edition server with unlimited licenses, or $2,935 with ten phones. PBXtra's Call Center Edition, which allows for distributed call centers, is $1,995.
Fonality, the leader in affordable, enterprise-class IP-PBX phone systems for small and medium businesses and the world’s largest distributed deployment of Asterisk™, today announced that users of PBXtra have placed 20 million calls since the product first became available in October 2004. Fonality has deployed PBXtra to more than 10,000 business users domestically and internationally and has a network of 1,200 resellers in 14 countries. Earlier this year, Business 2.0 magazine named Fonality one of “The Next Net 25” – 25 companies helping to reinvent the Web.
“Open Source is really helping us attack an overpriced telephony market with innovative products at the right price,” said Chris Lyman, Fonality’s founder and CEO. “Our growth over the past 18 months demonstrates how hungry SMB owners are for powerful, yet affordable, business phone solutions.”
Unlike most alternative Asterisk-based PBX offerings, PBXtra is more than a simple front-end designed to make it easier for Linux and Asterisk experts to install and manage Asterisk. Fonality has written more than 250,000 lines of code that dramatically streamline the complex tasks of PBX deployment and management. As a result, PBXtra is the world's first true PBX that can be installed and administered remotely using a Web browser, without any specialized training.
PBXtra's enterprise-class features include telecommuting, branch office support, voicemail-to-email, click-to-call, VoIP, softphones, support for IP and analog phones, call recording, distributed call center queuing and more. Businesses deploying PBXtra pay 40 to 80 percent less than they would for a traditional PBX purchase because the software runs on standard PC hardware and uses layers of Open Source Linux and Asterisk software.
PBXtra is available from Fonality or through a Fonality reseller. Pricing starts at $995 for the PBXtra Standard Edition server with unlimited licenses, or $2,935 with ten phones. PBXtra's Call Center Edition, which allows for distributed call centers, is $1,995.
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We've had fonality for 4 years now. Have a bonded T1 connected to it along with land lines.
Before I get into details, my single comment about fonallity is you get what you pay for! Cheap is never "cheap".
I'm also surprised to see the webiste fonalitsucks.com taken back by fonality. :-) That's unfortunate. there's nothing wrong with free speech.
The only reason I came across this post was because, after having used a fonality PBX for 4 years, we came across another frustrating situation with them. And the most amazing thing is when we escalted it to the manager (Mike C) he felt that there was nothing wrong, when in actuality there obviously was!
Keep in mind when we did purchased and installed our system, the now board members were the ones answering our phone calls and resolivng our issues.
In any case, I have to say I'm EXREMELY surprised and dissapointed to still see some of these internal issues there. Mike seemed more interestd in covering his own butt with someone in his dept, than acknoledging there was a problem. Low and behold when he found out it was also related to the sale dept, he said he would jump on it right away and make sure to push it up the chain of command to have that corrected.
In the 4 years we've used their system, it's been truly some very frustating moments and some great moments of amazement that was built into this system. We've gone through 2 servers already that crashed and in situation like that, it's obvious they're still going through growing pains. I think we had the first server that crashed due to a HD and they didn't know what to do.
And of course along with their growing pains, we feel it directly. And it can be VERY frustrating working these issues out with them, while their lower level techs are running around with their heads chopped off. Of course it takes a few hours of very frustrating, yelling and hair pulling, before it gets escalted to a level of compentency that can do anything. But it is more afforadable than antyhing on the market.
Again, you get what you pay for.