Lumen Next-Generation SIP Voice Services vs. Vonage Business Communications

CenturyLink SIP is an acceptable solution if you have an on-prem PBX (ShoreTel, Mitel, etc) that accepts SIP. I have found a better solution is to run two different carriers through SD-WAN (such as Bigleaf or Velocloud MSR) and use a provider like BCMOne (formerly NexVortex) to manage the SIP.

Incentivized

Vonage Business Cloud is well suited if you have small or limited IT staff and/or you have many remote workers and little or no on-prem hardware. I would recommend Vonage to small to medium-sized businesses. It would not be well suited to a large organization where everyone works in the same building and the IT staff has servers and staff to manage a VoIP system.

Incentivized

• Reliable service
• Supports wide range of key features
• They do have high levels of support where you can receive real answers

Incentivized

• Eliminates physical phone consoles that can be pricey and unnecessary for staff.
• Has a companion app that allows you to use your personal cell phone to check messages or make calls.
• The desktop application is easy to use and has a number of customizable settings so that the app can be minimized but alert you of incoming calls.

Incentivized

• Lumen-Centurylink has suffered from many noticeable outages in the last few years - this is a blow to their reputation that they still have to recover from.
• Lumen-CenturyLink does not peer well enough with OTHER carriers - they depend on their own network to give you SIP, which means less true redundancy.
• Lumen-CenturyLink needs a better customer portal/interface to handle failover, see the real-time status, etc.

Incentivized

• They do not take billing support calls. Online chat only. That can be dicey.
• Desktop app can have some hiccups and there are frequent updates. Sometimes it switches from my headset to webcam for no reason I can tell. Miss the call be for I figure it out.
• Text messaging does not handle images. Frustrates my clients when they think they can send me a pic of a signed doc or vin# and I don't get it.

I thought it had very practical and useful usability. It has a clean and simple interface with large fonts that make it easy to read. It isn't particularly difficult, although figuring out some operations may be a bit challenging. For the most part though, it isn't very difficult to use

Incentivized

SIP service support is definitely improving. A few years ago I would have rated them a 2. Now a 7. But, Lumen still needs a better portal experience to report and see a real-time status. Also to manage SIP failover functions in a WYSIWIG/GUI interface. When Lumen's network breaks in a larger outage, there are long hold times and support is not good.

Incentivized

We hardly have any issues with it to where we need to call them. There was a point where our connections across the board were terrible and it held us up in production quite a bit but since then things have been pretty simple and streamlined.

Incentivized

CenturyLink [Enterprise Voice SIP] was the incumbent, so switching providers, particularly for our HQ was an overwhelming task for our small team. We did migrate from the legacy CenturyLink voice product EIPT to the new Voice Complete solution as well as upgrade our US and UK circuits along with a hardware upgrade of the managed PE routers in each location. We also decided to implement RingCentral in one of our very small international branches but the lack of features is problematic. We still have T1 service in our other international branches but are looking to go full cloud SaaS PBX there, likely through Microsoft Teams, which we already use for messaging. There are some complexities, as we can't port our numbers directly yet and need to set up an additional CUBE router for SIP. Eventually we hope to get to fully SaaS via Teams.

Incentivized

We believe Vonage Business Cloud is best for our organization over the AT&T and the Verizon platforms for several reasons including price, ease of use, connectivity, and other options. Since we have implemented this solution along with newer Polycom phones, we have had very few issues with our phones or our phone platform.

Incentivized

• Faster learning
• Increased numbers of calls
• Organization of calls

Incentivized

• We were able to remove expensive and out of date phones, and replace them with the user's choice of a new phone or Bluetooth, so we saved money.
• There was training time that needed to be committed for a 50+ person office which reduced productivity for a while.

Incentivized