I realize this bit of news is 3 days old, but I've been traveling, so cut me some slack! ; ) This news release claims Covad VoIP on T1 is up to 40% less than competitive offers
Covad Managed Voice and Data Bundle Up to 60% Less than Competitive Offers
San Jose, Calif. (March 8, 2005) - Covad Communications Group, Inc. (OTCBB: COVD), a leading national provider of integrated voice and data communications, today announced Voice-Optimized Access (VOA) technology on T1 and SDSL available to 6 million small businesses in over 900 cities nationwide.
"Covad stands alone with the creation of the only managed, business-class VoIP service that's available nationwide," said David McMorrow, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Covad. "Voice Optimized Access further unlocks the value of our facilities-based network and enables Covad to manage the voice quality over both the 'last mile' and our entire nationwide network."
McMorrow continued, "This strategic development demonstrates Covad's continued commitment to creating solutions that provide small-to-medium businesses with competitively priced, innovative communications services."
Unlike consumer-class VoIP products which require the customer to 'bring their own access' and do not control the quality of the broadband underlying their voice service, Covad's VOA technology manages the quality of both voice and data services simultaneously. With Covad's VOA technology customers can conduct daily business activities such as multiple phone calls and accessing large data files concurrently, without compromising their voice quality.
Covad VoIP on T1 is up to 40% less than competitive offers and is built to meet the economic and communication needs of a company with up to 200 employees. Covad VoIP on SDSL is up to 60% less than competitive offers and is built to meet the economic and communication needs of small businesses that have 5-50 employees. Both services eliminate the need for expensive and space consuming PBX equipment.
Covad VoIP provides the following capabilities:
• Find Me/Follow Me - Instant Call Forwarding - Assign just one phone number per employee and incoming calls will find them, wherever and whenever they want to be found.
• Click To Call - Speed Dial with the Click of a Mouse - Connect automatically with your contacts, including your Microsoft ® Outlook contacts list.
• Visual Voicemail - Find your most important messages instantly. View, prioritize and even mail your voice and fax messages.
• Fax Mail - Receive and forward faxes just like email. No more scrambling for lost faxes or re-faxing a fax. You can call your voicemail and redirect received faxes to any fax machine or email account.
Covad's Voice over IP services can be ordered directly by calling 1-866-462-3269.For more information on Covad's Voice over IP service visit Covad's website: http://www.covad.com.
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I work in Covad's Business VoIP Division. Prior to working at Covad I sold traditional telecom services in the CLEC world. I came to Covad because of the tremendous value that Covad's offering has for businesses. It can actually change how businesses operate. Please feel free to contact me with any questions about our hosted and managed solution. Jon Holsman: 847-850-1806, jholsman@covad.com
Covad is NOT the only nation wide provider of hosted VoIP services. CallTower also provides a Nation wide Hosted VoIP service and with much better reliability.
As many of you out there know Covad has been failing miserably in providing a reliable service. There have been un countable outages of service from no outbound or inbound dialing. No access to Voice mail Internet services being down Billing issues and the list goes on. The biggest problem for them is there core, Covad use a Sylantro soft switch. This soft switch is the core to there problems. Just ask ANY current or former Covad VoIP Customers, you will hear the same story over and over again.
CallTower as been providing a Hosted VoIP service for 4 years with over 99.9999% up time, Using Cisco's CallManager at the core for our soft switch!
If you are interested in finding out more about CallTower please see our web site at www.calltower.com or contact me direct at 818-206-5706.
We have converted many Covad customers including ones they are using as references on their web site.
I have Calltower, Covad, and an in house solution throughout my company. Because of my years of experience with VoIP and the variety of services I use I have a unique perspective of each. Covad has the more end user usable features than the others I use. Calltower has the voice recognition, but in our experience works less than half the time. Covad has also been extremely willing to work outside the box on some of our sites, where Calltower is extremely unwilling to do so, after you sign the contract. We have had numerous issues with Covad and Calltower relating to dropped calls, dead air, and services interruptions. The major difference between the two is that Covad is responsive to our issues, whether service or billing issues, while Calltower is not. One other difference is price, for our hosted solutions, Covad is much more affordable with their tiered pricing, and as a bonus Covad does not require a term, unlike Calltower. Both company’s have a great concepts for there products, but one is able to deliver their concept much better. Hosted services are always going to have some little issues, which my in house solution does not, but there are much more points of failure on a hosted system. That being said hosted pricing can be more affordable than an in house solution. Just some things to think about before you make your decision.
For those of you reading these dissatisfied customer posts about CallTower and Covad, there is another, better alternative: Smoothstone IP Communications. Because of service issues like those mentioned above, we have been signing a lot of ex-Covad customers and getting employment inquiries from numerous Covad salespeople. We have been providing nationwide VoIP services far longer than CallTower. We provide Fully Managed, IP communication services (including VoIP, but much more than that). Our proprietary platform offers much more than just a hosted Sylantro soft switch or a Cisco CallManager Platform. Our unique, professional services approach produces a custom-designed solution for each client, not a standardized product. I invite anyone who reads these posts to do a rigorous comparison between the three companies' offerings, service reputation and reliability.
Russ Maney
rmaney@smoothstone.com
www.smoothstone.com
These kind of services are definitely called for, and it seems that a lot of companies are realising it. There is obviously more than Covad offering simple solutions like these however, I hope the above posts are genuine, and not some unethical selling on behalf of those other companies. I tend to take comments like that with a pinch of salt. This is sad – blogs were supposed to inform you, but now it seems that trolls or whatever are making it difficult for us again. In the end, you'll just have to do your own research I guess.
Although VoIP is now the most wanted services in the communication world I still can't imagine myself getting one for myself. One major pitfall that I saw from this service is that unlike regular land-line phone service, an Internet phone doesn't communicate its location to emergency services. Some service providers ask you to register an address that they can pass to the 911 call center, but there's still no guarantee your call would get routed properly.
We have Covad and constantly have issues like voice mail boxes being deleted hours of not being able to make or receive calls phones keep freezing, and their number one excuse is one of there servers went down. What happened to redundancy, apparently Covad forgot that part.
Covad is a good firm, so is Call Tower. Broadcore also sells Hosted VOIP with Broadsoft at the core. I am a Director with Broadcore, and looking to hire Senior Level Sales people in all major metros in the US, please contact me if you have experience selling Hosted VOIP, thanks.
If you value having your phones work every day, stay away from Covad's Hosted VOIP or VOIP Trunking services. Their service is not reliable enough for business or personal IMHO - I should know I've had it for 2+ years at a firm of 60 with 3 locations. You could string 10 Vonage ATAs and it would be more reliable then Covad.
All their services share the same infrastructure, so when the main switch stops working all INBOUND AND OUTBOUND calls fail. Sometimes it takes hours for them to get it repaired (this is not a localized issue, but a systemwide issue) It's gotten progressively worse with Covad being almost broke, then being purchased by Platinum Equity and taken private. We've suffered about a dozen outages that exceeded 1 hour. Two of these were system-wide 3+ hour outages.
I can also speak to their broadband business. It stinks - lackluster support, massive finger pointing, long delays for fixes (even T1s). Go elsewhere for all your communications needs, anywhere but Covad.
And as I type this incoming calls to our firm have been failing for the past hour. Outbound calls were failing too for the first 30 minutes. We can't forward calls, they just fail.
If you DO choose Covad, I hope you have a full head of hair to lose.