Hi Michael.
Welcome to the forum.
VoIP is an excellent choice for soho telephony. Minimal investment and maximum flexibility. As long as you put a little effort in upfont you should end up with a system that would surpass a standard telephony solution.
Provider wise - I don’t actually use just one. We are signed up for almost every provider around now! We run a server with asterisk@home (now trixbox) installed to our datacenter, which allows us to setup provider stacking...
Every time someone makes an outgoing call, the number dialled is passed through rules, and is routed via the cheapest provider. It also gives us an element of redundancy should a provider go down as it will just go down the list until a call is routed successfully.
Sounds rather complex, but it is infact very simple... you can install trixbox on an old desktop machine, and stick it under your desk at home. Provider stacking is just one of the advantages you get from trixbox, should you wish, you can set up your own ivr system which would give your clients the impression that your business is much bigger than it is!
Oh yeah, trixbox is open source, so its free!
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keep it simple for those new to VOIP
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Vonage are a great provider if your new to VoIP. I used them ages ago when they first cropped up. I did find them rather restrictive if you wanted to go "off the beaten VoIP path" mind you. I haven't used them in ages, so cant really comment on how they are now. Watch out for their random charges:
Line Activation Fee £9.99
Fax Line Activation Fee £5.99
Virtual Number Activation Fee £5.99
Softphone Activation Fee £5.99
Line Disconnection Fee £23.99
Fax Line Disconnection Fee £5.99
Virtual Number Disconnection Fee £5.99
Line Reactivation Fee £5.99
Telephone Number Change Fee £5.99
Standard Shipping Fee £8.99
I would recommend VoIPfone, yes they have a rather higgledy piggledy website, but I cant fault their service so far.
Fax wise -
http://www.ukvoiptalk.com/viewtopic.php?t=163 I would maybe try a service like efax. VoIP isn't quite ready to handle faxing just yet.
Im not completly sure if our new forum sponsor does small installations, but you could always give them a shout and see what they can do.
If you want more info on setting up trixbox just drop me a pm.
Matt