VOIP or other Phone Solution In China?

Question

I am American and I run a small business in Shenzhen, China. I also have 3 Americans that work for me here in China. My customers in the US need to constantly contact our office via phone. Currently I have a skype phone, and my customers contact our office by calling a US phone number but it is routed to the skype In number that I have. The problem is that skype in is very unreliable, and it is killing my business. About 30% of the calls dont even come in. I have tried vonage and lingo and the quality is not good enough. I have also used a service called www.telcan.net, which provides me with a toll free number, that is routed to my LAN lines in China. This is also unreliable as around 20% of the calls also end up being dropped.

My question, is there a solution out there which will allow my customers to dial a US phone number which will allow me to reliablly receive phone calls at my office in China. Any help would greatly be appreciated as my current situation is frusturat

Answer 1

The problem is very likely the speed of ISP connection. Even if your internal LAN is a GigaLAN, you are still dealing with the network speed of your ISP provider and ultimately, the speed at which your office connects to the internet.

How are you connecting to your provider? Visa PPP and ASDN? What is the speed of your connection to your ISP? If it is less than 2,000 mbps your VOIP quality will suffer and you will experience droppages.

You could go with a major forwarding outfit like AT&T, or SBC, and they can route calls directly to your land lines, which will be far better than the skype or VOIP.

You need to chose where to spend your money, don't be so "Xiao Qi" with your decision. If you have option to improve your network bandwidth, than upgrade that and go for VOIP. That would be my first choice, otherwise, spend about an equal amount of money on a provider like AT&T for this service.