SOHO PBX

palooza

Hi, hoping someone can help me.

I operate a small one-man professional services business. I share an office with a larger business which has decided to discontinue its telephone receptionist cover. I'm trying to decide whether to move somewhere else with a receptionist, or find a technology solution that will allow me to stay put.

For business reasons, I would want clients and other contacts to be able to contact me through a single landline number, whether I was at my business address, at my home office or out and about. I would want a single voice mailbox to pick up calls if I choose to be unavailable because I am in a meeting or whatever. And I would want the message on the mailbox to be my own - not something that cheapens my business by telling callers that they are through to some telecom supplier's messaging service.

For several reasons, I don't want to just divert the landline to my mobile. I often find calling a landline and getting through to a mobile disconcerting, and I don't want to regularly inflict that on callers to my business. The mobile network sometimes fails to connect calls. I sometimes leave the mobile places by accident, or forget to charge it when I should. And I think that the mobile voice messaging experience is unsuitable.

So if I was at my business address I would want calls to arrive at my landline there. If I was at my home office I would want calls to arrive on a home office landline, and if I was out and about I would want to have a choice between having calls arrive on my mobile or diverting to my own (non-mobile) business voicemail. And to achieve this I would need some sort of remote access to the system to manage diverts.

My understanding of the standard Eircom call forwarding service is that it will not work for me, because the call forwarding is set up from the line being diverted. So if I diverted the line, or forgot to divert it, I'd have to return to the office to change the divert. Also, I think there would be voicemail issues.

It seems to me that this must be a very common set of requirements, and that there should be a technology solution available pretty much off the shelf. But if there is, I'm having trouble finding it. Browsing the web, it looks like some Asterisk PBX systems might do the job, but it looks like specifying and setting up the systems would be beyond me, and would probably cost too much to have done from scratch professionally. And I don't know whether Irish PSTNs are sufficiently similar to those of other countries to allow me to take an off-the-shelf solution from (say) the US if I could find one.

Does anyone have any pointers?