OpenAccess 21st Century Communications

Infrastructure Requirements

In order to ensure quality of service (both in terms of reliability and also voice quality) our digital telephone services are available only for customers who have their main office connected to us either directly via fiber or via one of our fiber based MetroEthernet products.

If you have employees who telecommute (i.e. work from home or small branch offices), no problem! Generally, quality should not be an issue as long as they have a fast/low-latency internet connection. However we cannot guarantee call quality and it is difficult for us to troubleshoot any issues should any arrive in these kinds of situations.

See below for more information on phone equipment. If you have your own PBX system or VOIP solution already, and you are interested in migrating to our services, please let us know the specifics of your equipment (brand/model of the base station, handsets, etc., and how many handsets you have) or system.

What kind of telephone(s) do I need?
A. Generally there are two options. 1) If you have a one or two person office and already have some telephone handsets that you like, we can supply you with adapters to enable them to use our digital telephone service. 2) For larger offices, although adapters will work, it starts to become problematic when maintenance is necessary (to make requested changes to how your system behaves). Using adapters may also increase clutter, as each handset and fax device requires an adapter box (they are about 4"x4"x1.25" and have a small AC adapter). These devices and their wires can be an annoyance for some people. In addition, troubleshooting problems when multiple adapters are in use becomes more problematic. For larger offices we strongly recommend that you upgrade to modern VOIP enabled telephone handsets and/or portables.

How does call forwarding, 'follow me', voicemail and all that work (PBX services)
A. There are two fundamental ways to go about this. Option (A) - Hosted PBX which we have had good experience with thus far is to simply utilize OpenAccess PBX services. The advantage of this is that there is no cost in hardware, software, installation and maintenance services. In addition, there is no need for you to have a 'PBX box' located somewhere at your office along with a UPS system to keep it running if you have a power outage. Option (B) - Your own PBX. Although we have not yet (as of May 2013) deployed a PBX on-site at a customer location, we have experience in this for our own telephone systems and of course for the hosted PBX solutions we provide to customers already. Overall we see few advantages of hosting your own PBX system unless you are a larger firm that has at least one full time IT staff person that can manage the system, and/or need to meet certain compliance or regulatory requirements.

We already have a SIP capable PBX system at our office, will your service work with this?
A. Yes, as long as your PBX accepts open standards for its SIP connectivity, it should work just fine. OpenAccess has not broadly tested against all the different kinds of equipment out there so we will not be able to help you with the details of configuring your equipment but as long as you have a dedicated staff person or a third party contractor who has expertise with your specific hardware, model and deployment generally speaking it should be fairly easy to get things up and running.

Can I use this system at my home office as well as work?
A. Yes, telecommuting is supported. Our hosted PBX system is very flexible and depending on your specific needs can be configured to handle your inbound calls in a variety of ways depending on whether you are usually in the main office, home office, or prefer working off your cel phone.

Digital Telephone (aka VOIP) has been around for a long time, why hasn't OpenAccess offered this earlier?
A. There are several reasons that we have delayed offering VOIP service. The bottom line is that we have not wanted to offer digital telephone service unless it was a quality service. Early on with VOIP, there were numerous technical 'gotchas' and workarounds. Many common firewall appliances did not support SIP traffic through them very well and the standards for telephones and the SIP trunking service itself were still somewhat in flux along with incompatible vendor specific extensions. In late 2007 as the technology had matured, OpenAccess found itself needing to make significant architectural changes and upgrades to its infrastructure and network overall. This was a large project, which entailed building out small facilities for ourselves, moving around hundreds of circuits, upgrading multitenant commercial buildings (still not completely finished yet) all while keeping existing services up and running smoothly. We had originally expected this work to be completed by the end of 2009, but it took us until mid-2010 to get everything complete.