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meritt ◴[] No.22703456[source]
It works really well.

One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in. It's drastically reduced people fumbling around with phone numbers + participant codes, ending up in the wrong meeting, or getting stuck in some unnecessary software install loop. If someone is more than two minutes late, they're getting a phone call that brings them instantly into the meeting.

Also a really nice feature, again for phone conferences, is when people dial-in I see their phone number handle in the UI. But during the call as they introduce themselves or I look up their number, I can then rename their user to something recognizable. Now if I'm on a call with 5 people at another firm, I appear really impressive because I know who each person is by their name. When someone is speaking on the conference call, their icon lights up. If someone has a ton of background noise I can easily mute them.

Zoom Phone (addl paid feature) is awesome too. Virtual phone numbers, IVR, call routing, busy hours, I can instantly turn a 1:1 conversation into a zoom meeting that other people can join, etc. Zoom Phone works on my iphone like a regular dialer, and I can place/receive fully digital calls on it (pretty similar to how Google Voice works), so it doesn't matter if I have actual cell service.

I've never used Microsoft Teams, and does look really snazzy, but Zoom is an absolute joy to use compared to every single other conferencing software I have ever used. The video chat and screensharing is fast and responsive and just works exactly like you would expect it to.

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1. jmacd ◴[] No.22703745[source]
I believe Zoom Phone is a whitelabel of RingCentral
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2. geophile ◴[] No.22703847[source]
Their About Us page makes no mention whatsoever of technology. There is no CTO, no VP Engineering, etc. Quite odd. If they were relabeling something else, that could explain it.
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3. dvtrn ◴[] No.22704075[source]
Not to present any kind of “whatabouts” or whatever, just speaking truth to power:

You’d be shocked (maybe) how much White-labeling and reselling there is in the communications/“unified” communications and presence space.

Especially now in the age of programmable voice.

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4. wcarron ◴[] No.22704752{3}[source]
How exactly is this "speaking truth to power"?

As an aside, I hate that phrase. I get it, but i find it cringe-inducing.

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5. collinmanderson ◴[] No.22705022[source]
They do have a partership. I know RingCentral whilelabels Zoom for video, so maybe vice versa for phone.

https://www.ringcentral.com/whyringcentral/company/pressrele...

6. dvtrn ◴[] No.22705179{4}[source]
I say it as a telecom industry insider watching the industry cannabalize itself in the chase for margins because of over-provisioning and terrible self-regulation of reseller and whitelabel programs, and even poorer regulation of service delivery.

This isn't a critique of reselling or whitelabelling a communications platform that provides good value; it's just that there are a LOT of bottom-feeders latched on and hiding in the tangled web of resold trunks and bulk-purchased DIDs wreaking a lot of financial havoc.

I speak of course, to robocallers/robotexters and their kin, which are not new problems but have only been amplified when access to the public switching network became as easy as 'buy a voice over IP DID for twenty-five cents'. I am however curious to see the impact of SHAKEN/STIR.

This all to speak nothing of toll fraud committed via compromised SIP trunks (most often due to poorly configured Asterisk instances setup so an MSP in BFE can say "we sell phones"). Preserving the names of the involved parties but I have seen bills for some consulting clients that reached beyond six figures from one month of toll fraud. The culprit? The office had bought a "PBX in a box" from a local vendor, who only configured it enough to get a dial tone and a phone number from randomly registered CLEC, connected the thing to the public internet, and walked off with a hefty paycheck.

The FCC doesn't really get off the hook here either, while there are requirements and guidelines for inter-connectivity to the public switching network, enforcement is-or in my own anecdotal experience since 2001, non-existent sans making sure you've paid your USF dues. I'm open to correction on this point, if anyone has experience on the matter I'm curious to know what the interaction was like; the rest is mindless opinion.

Taking this last point a bit further and bringing it all home: You could very easily start a "phone company" in rural Georgia with pretty low comparative overhead and sell phones service to an entire community and trivially disappear overnight before the Feds even glanced in your direction with more money than you put into it. Left improperly secured, the robocallers just found a new forward operating base.

If anything I'm aiming to point at the (perhaps unintended) results of making telecom so easy, in a way we created these problems, this is the bed we've made for ourselves in the industry.