VOIPo Launch Updates

[VOIPoTim]

We’re pleased to announce that VOIPo will soon be launching a trio of services as outlined below. The full line of services including Residential VoIP Service and Hosted PBX Business services will be phased in shortly after the initial launch.

Once all services are launched, you will be able to resell virtually ANY VoIPo service under your own brand and get the services from us at wholesale with a VOIPo reseller account.

The following services will be launched first:

Toll-Free Service

With our Toll-Free service, you’ll be able to get a toll-free number and have it forward calls to any US or Canadian phone number or SIP address.

Estimated Pricing:

$4.95/Month (Paid Monthly)
$2/Month (Paid Yearly)
100 Minutes Included Monthly
Additional Minutes Billed at 4.9 Cents


Virtual Numbers

With this service, you’ll be able to get phone number from nearly 6,000 locations throughout the US and point it to your existing US or Canadian phone number or SIP address.

As an example, if you are in Dallas, you could order phone numbers from New York City and Orlando and have them both point to you in Dallas. This is especially useful if you want to have local numbers in areas your customers are in.

Estimated Pricing:

$4.95/Month (Paid Monthly)
$2/Month (Paid Yearly)
500 Minutes Included Monthly
Additional Minutes Billed at 1.9 Cents


Online Faxing

With VOIPo’s fax service, you'll be able to get a fax number which allows you to receive faxes in your e-mail.

When something is faxed to your fax number, it will be converted to a PDF file and e-mailed to you automatically.

Estimated Pricing:

$4.95/Month (Paid Monthly)
$2/Month (Paid Yearly)
100 Faxes Included Monthly
Additional Faxes Billed at 25 Cents

Here are some demo screenshots for the initial services:


http://www.voipo.com/demo1.JPG


http://www.voipo.com/demo2.JPG


http://www.voipo.com/demo3.JPG


More info will be posted as it is available. We look forward to working with you in the coming year and providing you and your customers with world-class telecommunications services.


***MARCH UPDATE: We have now entered public BETA.***

BETA Status

Remember, this is a Public BETA launch of these services. There will be issues that come up and with your help we can find them and resolve them quickly. You may run into some minor service issues.

We’re pretty confident that there will be no major issues, but some javascript errors, ordering glitches, etc are highly likely. Service will not be perfect yet.
We may limit the BETA later depending on how full it gets, but will try to get everyone interested in.

Support

Support is limited during the BETA and response times may be slow because we are not fully staffed and need more time to troubleshoot issues in a BETA environment.

Documentation is not fully complete during the BETA. Your questions and feedback will really help us to finish it because we can see what you’re asking about and add make sure we have the common questions covered. Please don’t hesitate to ask us questions.

If you have an issue, please e-mail support@voipo.com to report it. As I’ve said, responses will be slow during the BETA so keep that in mind.

We also encourage everyone to register on the VOIPo Forums at forums.voipo.com so that you can interact with our Alpha Group who have been helping us test the service for the last year as we built it.

Most importantly, please do NOT contact HostGator with VOIPo issues. HostGator and VOIPo are seperate companies and employees of each company do not have any info about or access to the other company's services.

Billing

We appreciate your help with finding issues quickly and your patience over the last 18 months. We are going to give you your first month of service free. No billing information is required.

Don’t be alarmed when you see charges and a balance being generated in your vPanel. All accounts will be brought to $0 at the end of the month.

After trying the service, if you wish to keep it, you just need to provide billing information before the end of the month. You’ll be billed from that point on.

In order to prevent abuse, all BETA accounts have an internal credit limit of $250. There have been a few cases where some of you ordered yearly plans, etc not realizing this. If you exceed the credit limit because of something like that, please contact us and we can get you back up and running.

Please see the first post in this thread for pricing information which will apply if you decide to keep service AFTER the BETA.

Fax Service

For this BETA, we are only including Toll-Free fax numbers. Upon full launch, we will offer local numbers in all of our other rate centers in the US and Canada as well.

Local Numbers

For this BETA, we are also only offering US phone numbers for the local number selection. Canada and expanded US cities will be added at full launch.

If you have any questions, please post here or contact support@voipo.com. Again, do NOT contact HostGator. HostGator and VOIPo have a marketing relationship only and HostGator will not be able to provide assistance or answer questions about VOIPo.

[Sam]

Cool

Its a shame im in the UK lol

[VOIPoTim]

Originally Posted by Sam

Cool

Its a shame im in the UK lol

We're working on some things targetted towards those outside of the US as well. I'd estimate at least 40% of HostGator's customer base is outside of the US, so we definitely want to work with you guys too. We just have to do so while still following the US regulations.

As an example, you'd be able to get a Virtual Number from somewhere in the US and instead of having it point to a US Number, you could use software to have it forward to your computer instead.

So it just depends on what you want to do. If you don't mind having a US phone number, you could even get our residential service and people in the US could call you on the US number and you'd be able to call them using your account instead of paying for international calls.

[Jordanlw]

Thank You,
This is a excellent service can't wait for it to be active...

[kmaw]

Thanks for the update Tim.

You forgot to post a year though...

[slapshotw]

Those prices are our cost as resellers, or recommended retail?

[VOIPoTim]

Originally Posted by slapshotw

Those prices are our cost as resellers, or recommended retail?

These are discounted retail prices which will be available to HostGator customers on an ongoing basis and to the public as a launch promotion. The regular retail is slightly higher.

Reseller pricing will be available when the reseller plans are announced.

[esl]

What happens if a person calls a USA toll free number from China, or the Bahamas? Would the per minute rate go up, or would there be any extra charges?

[herpherp]

Originally Posted by esl

What happens if a person calls a USA toll free number from China, or the Bahamas? Would the per minute rate go up, or would there be any extra charges?

They can't, Toll Free Numbers are for the US Most countries outside the US can not call a US toll free number...

[VOIPoTim]

Originally Posted by herpherp

They can't, Toll Free Numbers are for the US Most countries outside the US can not call a US toll free number...

Right. The calls just wouldn't be completed.

[esl]

Okay. Thank you both!

[jaxdoug]

Can we pre-sign for this?


jaxdoug

[slapshotw]

Originally Posted by jaxdoug

Can we pre-sign for this?

I wouldn't sign up for this until you actually see it in action. Last time they got us excited about it launching "soon" was more than a year ago...

[gtgeorge]

Originally Posted by Serra

You have my word that this will be launch in March of 2008 and you can quote me on that!

very well put!

[imaginehosting]

This Sounds Great I am extremly interested In this.
Are HostGator customer going to be able to resell this service.
Like a reseller hosting account. I would like more info on this if possible.
I have a reseller account now with hostgator. We this work Like Vonage
thru a isp then a router.

Thank you ImagineHosting.net

[gdwoods]

With VOIPo’s fax service, you'll be able to get a fax number which allows you to receive faxes in your e-mail.

When something is faxed to your fax number, it will be converted to a PDF file and e-mailed to you automatically.

Wouldn't most people who get faxes need to fax out as well?

[VOIPoTim]

Originally Posted by imaginehosting

This Sounds Great I am extremly interested In this.
Are HostGator customer going to be able to resell this service.
Like a reseller hosting account. I would like more info on this if possible.
I have a reseller account now with hostgator. We this work Like Vonage
thru a isp then a router.

Thank you ImagineHosting.net

Basically, you'll just need a VOIPo reseller account and that'll give you the ability to resell all of our VoIP solutions:

1) VoIP for the Home - Your customers just plug a device into their router and the use their regular phones to use it just like their standard phone service. This would be similar to Vonage, yes.

2) Hosted PBX - Complete business class phone system with Extensions, Queues, Conferencing, IVRs, Hunt Groups, Voicemail, etc. This would be similar to Packet8's Virtual Office solution.

3) Online Faxing, Toll-Free Numbers, Virtual Numbers - As described above.

[slapshotw]

Originally Posted by gdwoods

Wouldn't most people who get faxes need to fax out as well?

I use a service like this because I need inbound faxes much more commonly than I need outbound. Many services also give you an email address you can email a file to, with the phone number to fax it to in the subject line or body for outbound.

[VOIPoTim]

Originally Posted by slapshotw

I use a service like this because I need inbound faxes much more commonly than I need outbound. Many services also give you an email address you can email a file to, with the phone number to fax it to in the subject line or body for outbound.

Outbound faxing is being added (and included with the other fax accounts), but since it's not 100% done and tested yet, I didn't want to mention it.

Basically when it's added, you'll just be able to send them from within vPanel or by registering e-mail addresses as "authorized" and e-mailing a file with the fax number formatted a certain way in the e-mail. The file you attach to the e-mail would be sent if from an "authorized" e-mail on your account.

[eLIANT]

Any chance we can get a look at advance copies of tutorials or instructions?

[VOIPoTim]

Originally Posted by eLIANT

Any chance we can get a look at advance copies of tutorials or instructions?

Not yet, sorry.

[slapshotw]

Hello all,

Tim was kind enough to let me use a live version of their product today. The features I used were:

1. Local number creation and forwarding
2. Toll-free number creation and forwarding
3. Fax number creation and forward to an email

I can say that I was very impressed with their interface and features. Although they say number provisioning can take up to 30 minutes (but more likely 10), the numbers I setup were forwarding to my cell phone within seconds (literally, I tried it about 30 seconds after creating the number and it worked). The quality was excellent.

When you create a number (toll-free, local, or fax) you do it through an easy to use, fast interface with many number and area code choices. Honestly, I had a number picked out within about 2 minutes of clicking to the screen.

The features are very simple--you will not find features like changing forwards automatically based on time, voicemail, do not disturb, etc..., however, it is the perfect solution for a lot of people especially given the price. Non tech-savvy customers of resellers should be able to easily use it.

I hope that helps some of the curious. I wasn't able to test with hundreds of minutes or anything like that, so I can't really speak to the reliability/downtime (if any) of the service.

-Matt

[VOIPoTim]

So seeing really is believing, right?

Thanks for the feedback.

Originally Posted by slapshotw

Hello all,

Tim was kind enough to let me use a live version of their product today. The features I used were:

1. Local number creation and forwarding
2. Toll-free number creation and forwarding
3. Fax number creation and forward to an email

I can say that I was very impressed with their interface and features.

[atlan]

First off I must say I was extremely excited to see this type of service. Being a reseller for years, I have always been looking for more business type features to be able to offer my clients and addon type services in general.

I contacted Tim via e-mail and told him how many clients I have and that I thought there would be a keen interest in this type of offering.

I tested out the demo and within a minute had a toll free # setup. It took around 20 minutes for the toll free number to activate and work and has worked flawlessly!!

The user interface is VERY EASY to use and anyone could have this setup and working in no time with no problems at all.

I am very impressed and cannot wait to offer this service! Very nice, very well priced, very easy to use, very big thanks to HG and Tim.

i will be very excited to see how this works!