FonAngle: Up and Coming VoIP Provider

A quick search for “FonAngle” in LinkedIn lists FonAngle CTO Chris Meyers as “Senior Geek at FonAngle Communications.” FonAngle, you could say, is by geeks, for the rest of us. Their Hosted Office Phone System (HoPs) PBX platform has just won them a 2012 Internet Telephony Award.

Most VoIP providers charge either by “seat,” which is essentially by how many desks with phones there are, or by line. FonAngle actually gives customers the choice of either per line pricing or per user pricing, to keep prices low. They also offer two separate SIP Trunking pricing models.

In FonAngle’s per user pricing, each user gets an individual line, an extension number, their own voice mail box, a listing in the dial-by-name directory, and the usual suspects of class-five softswitch features (call rules, auto-attendant, web portal, etc.). According to their current promotion, you can get “Micro,” 1-2 users for $39.95 each; “Professional,” 3-7 users for $29.95 each; or “Professional+,” 8+ for $23.95 each. Over 50 users they recommend giving them a call for a quote.

FonAngle’s per line pricing is a good deal for offices that only have light phone usage, and have six or more users. They liken it to sharing a photocopier. They three set pricing tiers: “Corporate” has 4 lines, and can support up to 12 users, $179.95; “Enterprise: has 6 lines and can support up to 18 users, $269.95; and Enterprise+ has 8 lines and can support up to 24 users, $359.95. Any more than 25 users and they recommend giving them a call for a quote.

In addition to the many included VoIP features, FonAngle has a number of premium add-ons. They have a very reasonable fax plan, which uses the T.38 standard, of $14.95/mo for unlimited faxing and fax-to-email. Their Conference bridge supports up to 20 participants, and has 600 conference minutes for $14.95/mo, or unlimited conferences for $34.95/mo. FonAngle conference calls support HD Audio. Toll Free is also available, with inbound minutes prices at 100 for $4.95, 1,500 for $39.95, and 10,000 for $199.95, with overage minutes becoming progressively cheaper. FonAngle has their own chat client which is an additional $1.95/mo. FonAngle also has customizable overhead and phone-to-phone paging, a feature which also comes at a premium.

FonAngle also offers both analog and IP PBX SIP trunking. In their hybrid solution, outbound calls go to an enterprise gateway, then to the FreedomSIP servers over the internet. In their all-IP solution, each call goes through the IP-aware PBX to the FreedomSIP Servers. In either case, once the call goes through the FreedomSIP servers, the call goes to the intended recipient.

FonAngle really puts its money where its mouth is for reliability. FonAngle has a five nines level SLA. If your service drops out for more than a half hour, you get up to one and a half days of service free; if FonAngle is down for an hour to a day, you get three days of free service, and if you are without service for more than 24 hours, you get ten days free service. The clock starts when they receive your support request email. FonAngle also has automatic failover. If the network goes down, calls are automatically forwarded to landlines and cell phones, just like an office-wide find me/follow me.

Also of note, FonAngle casts a wide net when it comes to IP phones. Instead of being locked into only Cisco or PolyCom, FonAngle works with popular Yealink, Aastra, PolyCom, and Cisco phones, conference phones, and ATAs. They also recommend the free “fring” SIP client. FonAngle does add the caveat that if you don’t buy your equipment from them, they cannot provide technical support for that hardware.

FonAngle makes the same promise that the best VoIP providers do: excellent customer service and network reliability. They’ve made and kept that promise to franchise owners, accounting firms, and software developers in both the US and Canada, and you can expect that FonAngle will be another big name SMB VoIP provider in the years to come.