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Centrex, IP Style: Page 2 of 15

A caveat: Because IP Centrex is still relatively new, coverage areas vary widely. GoBeam offers its service directly only on the West Coast but wholesales to carriers, including Verizon. MCI's coverage is nationwide. ICG falls in between the two, with a service area that cuts a swath across the country. As for pricing, most plans vary by region, and the price you pay will depend on your needs. For example, you can save money by reducing the number of included long-distance minutes. GoBeam also offers an attractive flat-rate option.

After making free long-distance calls to friends, co-workers and anyone else we could think of, we decided GoBeam has the best interface and functionality. For smaller businesses or those not ready for the IP Centrex plunge, check out "Don't Want Centrex?".


GoBeam not only snagged our Editor's Choice award, it did so handily. Note to GoBeam's CEO: The folks who designed the service's Web front-end applications deserve a lot of the credit. Accessing the features of our phone was quick and painless. Everything is set up clearly with tabs, though we got a little lost while configuring the phone. Once the configuration was completed, we found using the phone less complicated.

GoBeam sent us a Cisco 7960 IP Phone connected to GoBeam's own phone system. The 7960 came up on the first try without any help from us. GoBeam was a bit concerned that our public address was assigned via DHCP by our broadband provider, but this didn't seem to bother the phone at all. The company also thought we might need to place the phone in the firewall's DMZ, but we didn't. Our first call was to GoBeam to tell it we were good to go!


GoBeam calls its Web application the Dashboard, and we logged in directly from GoBeam's home page--no need to remember a long URL. Once logged in, we could access all the phone's features with just the click of a tab. (Having a large screen helped too--we didn't have to scroll all over the place.)

The main tab presented us with the most-used features: How To Reach Me, access to contacts, conference calling and call logs. The How To Reach Me feature was especially well-thought-out: Depending on who was calling, it could be configured in different ways by instructing the softswitch what to do with calls. For example, you can have all calls sent directly to your voicemail. You can even leave a list of numbers for the service to try if you're not at your desk. This eliminates having to change your voicemail message every time you step out of the office.