Aptela Business VoIP

Aptela hosted VoIP service is intended for small and medium-sized companies that want a feature set comparable to what a big company might offer. The company organizes its efforts to turn you into a customer with a five-step process: compare, test, price, switch and customize. Let’s look at those five steps:

Compare: Aptela compares itself not to other Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) suppliers but to alternative technologies, including on-premise PBX system and traditional phones. Based on feature sets, flexibility and ease of use, upgrades and management, Aptela VoIP wins. VoIP technology has certain inherent advantages simply by being software-based rather than hardware-intensive for the user.

Among the features Aptela stresses are its find-me/follow-me service and voice-mail to e-mail conversions. In terms of ava9ilable features, like most suppliers of this type, Aptela offers a full suite of features such as call-waiting and forwarding, transferring, conference calls, etc. You can find the full list on the company’s website.

Test: Aptela suggests you test-drive what they can offer you. Through a combination of videos on the company’s web-site (excellent, by the way, and very informative – two thumbs up) and a scheduled half-hour phone meeting with a rep, including a live demo to let you hear sound quality, Aptela will answer any questions you have.

Price: Aptela hosted services are priced based on the number of users and call volume. You can choose from three levels of service for each user: unlimited, business and metered.

Unlimited pricing, starting at $29.99 per employee per month is fairly self-explanatory in that there are no limits to your local, long-distance or in-network calls for that price. Business pricing, priced at $19.95 per month per employee gives you 250 minutes of local/long distance calling, with extra minutes priced at 2.5¢ each. Metered calling charges you a straight 2.5¢ per minute.

Switch:

The actual process of switching to Aptela can be completed in as few as seven days. After reviewing your site survey, an Aptela rep will help you configure your system, establish departments, queuing and calling rules and auto attendants, order and set up your equipment – in short, everything you need to get through your first calls.

Customize:

Once your system is up and running, Aptela will help you customize your system to take advantage of all the various features available to you, including find me/follow me, auto-attendant menus (touch 1 for sales, 2 for service, 3 for accounting, etc.), inter-department messaging and other functions that help you get the most out of your phone system’s capabilities.

Overview of Features with Polycom Phones

 

Each user has access to a web portal to track and manage his phone account, to add or change features and perform system maintenance. It also allow you access to your phone account from any computer with a browser and an internet connection. There were not a lot of reviews of Aptela on the web, but those that we did find were generally positive.

There is no limit to the number of callers you can have, save for bandwidth considerations. Figure that you will need about 64 kbps of bandwidth per simultaneous call. Check with your internet service provider to see how much bandwidth you have available in your connection. If you will be making a large number of simultaneous calls, you might need to increase your bandwidth.

Unlike many suppliers, Aptela provides you a specific customer support person rather than just giving you the next available representative.

Setup An Analog Phone With an ATA Adapter

 

Aptela is a privately-held company headquartered in Herndon Virginia. It can be reached at (703) 386-1500. Customer service can be reached at (800) 994-4486.