VOIP Monthly Charges - How to Setup Billing?

[JeffTurgeon]

Would like to test the usage of VOIP at one of the building in our stake that has continued failures of the POTS lines outside of the building.

Our stake gave permission and it looks like the FM is fine as well but the VOIP carriers want to bill a credit card each month. I also learned that the church in Salt Lake basically pays for all of the landlines and then bills back the stakes for reimbursement. Probably a way to bundle them all together to get a better overall price.

I heard mention that SL has what is called a "P-Card" that they use for this type of situation. I guess the company auto-bills to the P-Card (works like a credit card payment to the vendor) and then SL pays the P-Card bill.

I tried emailing someone that the Global Desk referred me to in order to see if we could get into the VOIP testing program which surely had this billing issue figured out but heard nothing back. I'm guessing the testing my be over from reading some of the other VOIP conversations and seeing their posting dates.

Anyone know whom we would contact to see about setting up a "P-Card" solution so we can order VOIP service to transition one of our buildings for our own testing purposes? Thinking about using Ooma as a simplistic and low cost solution which has provides E911.

[Mikerowaved]

You'll need to work with your FM group. They'll handle the billing and porting of the number(s) over from your POTS carrier to the VOIP provider. They'll also be responsible for mounting the VOIP adapter(s) and making sure the appropriate phones are connected to them. While I don't know for certain, I imagine the church has an approved list of VOIP providers that your FM group can get access to.

[JeffTurgeon]

Just finished moving our phone service to VOIP through Comcast. In order to do this I needed the following approvals: 1) First the Stake Presidency had to agree. 2) The FM had to agree. 3) The church offices in Salt Lake had to agree to the new provider as they have national contracts and get billed directly for each unit.

The church has very few providers that they can get bills from so there is a short list. We went with Comcast. We have the cheapest basic service which you'd use for a fax machine. The line has caller-ID with name and that's basically it. It was the cheapest plan at about $20 a month.

To do the conversion our cable modem had to be near the phone circuits. I supplied an RJ11 female jack for each of our 2 phone numbers. Comcast mounted their modem and plugged in a standard cable from their modem to the RJ11. This setup allowed us to re-energize our existing setup without any changes in equipment while at the same time cutting our phone bills by more than half.

Install took Comcast 3 minutes since it was simply a plug and run job. Service has been flawless since installed.