Sipgate Team
Affordable and featurefilled IP telephony makes Sipgate Team an ideal VoIP host for SMBs
SCORE PRICE
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Starts from £14.95 per month (exc VAT)
very business can benefit from VoIP, but not everyone wants to set up and manage their own dedicated PBX. The Sipgate Team service could be the solution. It offers good value and plenty of features, with no minimum contract period and no need for an on-site server.
Your main interface with the service is the web portal. This is nicely designed, displaying details of all inbound and outbound calls, account billing status and options to order more phone services and numbers. We settled for the numbers already assigned to our account, but you can request local, 0845, 0870 or international numbers – and port over existing landlines as well.
To get set up, we assigned our admin account a number from the list along with an internal extension. For phone provisioning, we used a Yealink T23G IP handset. This had to be configured manually via its own web interface, but the process was easy.
Once a phone had been assigned to a user, it was displayed in their personal settings, along with icons showing its status. Hovering the mouse pointer over the phone icon popped up a menu where we could change its name, display its SIP credentials, deactivate it and fire off a quick ring test.
Additional users were just as easy to configure. We also created a group with its own fax and answerphone, and set it so that calls to its assigned number would cause all members’ phones to ring.
As well as physical handsets, Sipgate Team supports all manner of softphones. We tried out Zoiper for Windows – usefully, the Sipgate website offers a downloadable version of this software that’s preconfigured to use its service, so we had to enter only our username and password to get up and running.
The Zoiper iOS app is just as easy to configure. After loading it, we just had to scan in the QR code on Sipgate’s Zoiper support site to set the app’s basic server details. We then entered our account details and were up and running in less than two minutes.
To test call routing, we assigned
“Sipgate Team offers good value and plenty of features, with no minimum contract period and no need for an on-site server”
mobile numbers to each account and customised their ring rules. By default, an incoming call will ring all of a user’s assigned phones, but you can easily change this so that only specific phones ring.
There are plenty of more advanced PBX features on offer. An autoattendant can be added to a group, so that callers are offered a list of extensions to ensure they’re directed to the right person. Custom announcements are created by uploading MP3 files or using the portal’s Click2Record feature, which calls a phone and uses it to record and store your welcome message.
Group voicemail allows callers to leave a message, while call-forwarding rules can redirect them to other users, or a mobile. Multiple rules can be used to implement call hunting, with schedules to determine the active times and days.
Voicemail and call forwarding can also be applied on a per-user basis. You decide who can call international and premium-rate numbers, or others that may incur a charge.
For the ultimate phone service, the Sipgate Team Pro package starts at £10 extra per month, and activates call queuing and interactive voice response (IVR) services that read out a menu of options.
If you want to take advantage of the full range of VoIP services then a fair amount of configuration is inevitable, but we found the online help seemed to have an answer for everything. If you don’t want the cost and complexity of an on-site VoIP PBX, Sipgate Team is an excellent alternative – all you need to provide is your own phones or headsets.