We looked at 

• XO
• EarthLink
• Verizon
• Bay Networks.
  

We looked at Vonage and 8x8.

At that time we could have continued with Broadview. We had RCN and we had the option to use another provider called Frontier. But RCN was a better choice, a better fit for us because of pricing, the customer service, and the investment they put into their infrastructure in Lehigh Valley, where they have multiple hubs to support redundancy and failover. Those were three areas that we looked at and were a priority for us.

We did try out Nextiva early on. This was before RCN when we were still toying with a few things, and that would have been seven years ago. One of the reasons we tried Nextiva was that we thought technology was moving that way. But we didn't have the proper bandwidth at that time to really give Nextiva the proper testing it needed. It wasn't until we got a full fiber network in our facility that we saw a change and the possibility of having a VoIP phone system. Once we did move to this new technology it changed our lives a lot.

We also evaluated 8x8 Business VoIP. Skype was the other one we tried. We also looked at trying to roll out even more Vonage on their business side, but because of their technical support, because of their customer support, we scratched them off the list fairly quickly. It was our rep who handled our fiber who said, "Hey, we have a phone solution, a VoIP phone solution that we think would save you money and work really well for you." He said, "Can I have a copy of all your phone records?" I said, "You have to really get some good savings here for us to cut ties with AT&T and Vonage." They came back with a good offer and I said, "Okay, that looks great."

We considered three companies in the Lehigh Valley area as potential providers.

We were comparing hosted voice solutions everywhere. We were really just comparing prices. We already had RCN and they offered us the best price.

We were looking to go back to Norstar. They put on a big push trying to get in again. They said, "Hey, we lost your business to Verizon, we're doing SIP-based." But with RCN, the price was right. They came in, they referred us to some of their users. One of them was here in the Valley and it's a pretty big organization.

We looked at two other providers, in addition to RCN. The other two weren't as local, which is one of the reasons we didn't go with them. They weren't out of state, but they were further away.

There was a local company here that offered phone systems while continuing to use Verizon, but we found Verizon to be very difficult to work with. Maybe it's the sheer size of Verizon, but things just don't seem to work very well.