John Bennett of endpoint vendor Snom team up to look at what could happen when you mix and match devices in a telecoms-as-a-service deployment.

There has been a noticeable maturing of the hosted VoIP market, many of the reliability issues and delays in deployment in early installations are no longer haunting resellers. Service providers like VoiceHost and vendors like Snom have been learning to build and deploy reliable and high quality hosted VoIP solutions that maintain satisfied customers.

Tesco's Internet Phone service was handled by Freshtel UK, whose demise prompted Tesco to drop the service. The phone numbers issued to Tesco customers came from Freshtel UK, now out of the picture, with Cable & Wireless routing the calls to Freshtel and thus having no responsibility for the end customers. So there's no one available to forward the calls and the numbers are now orphaned.

VoiceHost worked tirelessly to help stranded customers from the defunct service and was able to negotiate a new home.