Note to our loyal clients and readers: Opus Research has moved offices (roughly 500 Yards) from 300 Brannan Street to 350 Brannan Street. There has been an interruption in phone service to our main business line (415) 904-7666, but it will be restored shortly. In the meantime. I can be reached through my Google Voice number: (415) 692-4863 and Pete Headrick can be reached at 415 505-2511. Eventually this will all be straightened out, but there’s a lesson here that should serve small businesses well.

Initially, our plan was to move existing service into our new building, and we made plans accordingly talking with Comcast frequently to make sure everything was moving along as our moving day approached. But, one week before our move, when we called to see when the phone service would be installed, Comcast told us that it was not going to run a new line into 350 Brannan. As we figured it, our only alternative (which may or may not be the case) is AT&T, so we started the process with Ma Bell.

This is where we entered the theater of the absurd. From our perspective, we were establishing service in our new building. Something that the AT&T Web site says should take 5-7 business days. The problem is, to AT&T we, apparently are a “win-back.” Which, for reasons that only Comcast and AT&T can justify, adds another 20 days to the process (while AT&T waits for Comcast to “release the number”). I’d like to say “it’s not my problem,” but, because in the mean time we have no phone service, it is. The alternative that the folks at AT&T are proposing is to establish new service in our new building (which means getting a new phone number) and using a feature called “Remote Call Forwarding” to have calls to old number arrive at our new place. The actual resolution is pending (thus the recommendation above to call my Google Voice number).

I used to work for the part of Pacific Telesis (now part of AT&T) that sold and helped provisionsmall business phone systems, so I thought I knew what we were getting into. I was amused at first that, after three phone calls to learn about our order status, I still had not talked to the right person. Sales didn’t know because it wasn’t a “new sale.” Service provisioning had no record of it because an order had not yet been placed. It got down to locating the single sales rep at an affiliated company who took our order. That amazed me. If I were to do all of this over again, and were gonna change numbers anyway, I’d look more seriously at Web-based provisioning through Bandwidth.com Inc.’s Phonebooth.com. It delivers the features of a small business phone system over the Internet.

In the mean time. I plan to enjoy the features of Google Voice, which makes incoming calls ring in multiple places, transcribes voicemail, let’s me send and receive SMS text messages from my computer and originate phone calls when Gmail is running on my browser. Our neighbors in the new building are letting us “share” their WiFi, while we wait to learn more about the progress of our installation.

Life’s good.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Opus Research, IP telephony, Google Voice