HoverNetworks Review
Editor’s Rating:
Avg. User Rating:
| Overall | No Ratings |
HoverNetworks Review Summary
HoverNetworks Pros
- small business plans for any size home office or office
- unlimited extensions
- free Business Class IP Phone with 2yr Plan
- fully featured Hosted PBX
- No limit conference calls – as many people as you want
- free toll free and local number transfers
- good in-house 24/7 customer service
HoverNetworks Cons
- No Vanity Number Support
- No True 800 Numbers
- No click to call/call me features for the web
Bottomline
HoverNetworks is a new, up an coming virtual phone system provider, but we see a lot of promise from this company with strong VoIP technology foundations. They offer a strong, robust, feature rich hosted PBX with competitively priced office packages.
HoverNetworks Features/Benefits
HoverNetworks was founded in 2009 in Buffalo, NY. They currently offer flat rate/office bundled packages for 1-20+ users. They bundle them in increments of 1-3 users, 4-19, and 20+, which seems to be a standard that the industry is moving more and more towards. They along with both RingCentral and VirtualPBX will give you unlimited local and long distance calling but only 1000 toll free minutes per user per month. Again that seems to be pretty standard – no surprises there.
| Pricing: | SoHo (1-3 Users): $39.99 per month per user Office (4 – 19 Users): $29.99 per month per user Enterprise (20+ Users): $19.99 per month per user |
| Setup/Installation Fee: | No |
| Disconnect/Cancellation Fee: | No |
| Free Trial: | Yes – 30 Day HoverNetworks Free Trial |
| Customer Service: | 24/7 Great, In-House – 1 hour after hours call back |
| Included Minutes: | SoHo (1-3 Users): unlimited local/long distance, 1,000 toll free/month/user Office (4 – 19 Users): unlimited local/long distance, 1,000 toll free/month/user Enterprise (20+ Users):unlimited local/long distance, 1,000 toll free/month/user |
| Overage Minutes: | SoHo (1-3 Users): 2.9¢ Office (4 – 19 Users): 2.9¢ Enterprise (20+ Users): 2.9¢ |
| Incoming Lines: | SoHo (1-3 Users): one toll free and one local Office (4 – 19 Users): one toll free and one local Enterprise (20+ Users): one toll free and one local |
| Extensions: | SoHo (1-3 Users): unlimited Office (4 – 19 Users): unlimited Enterprise (20+ Users): unlimited |
| Local & 800 Transfer Fee: | no charge |
| 800 Vanity Number Fee: | not available at this time |
| True 800 Number Setup Fee: | not available at this time |
Likes
Unlimited Call-ins: With HoverNetworks you can have any number of people on a conference call that is hosted on your system.
24×7 In-house Customer Service: According to CEO Darren Ascone, HoverNetworks wants to be known for their quality customer service. They pride themselves in being a customer centric company – from their free consultation to help you pick the right solution to their 24×7 support after the sale to answer questions and deal with any issues that come up.
Business Class IP Phone Free with 2 yr Contract: If you sign up for a 2 year contract with HoverNetworks, you can get a business quality VoIP Polycom phone for free. This is a $100 minimum value.
High Definition Voice: All the business class phones used by HoverNetworks use HD audio for high quality, crisp sound for all your conversations.
No Charge for Local and Toll Free Number Tranfers: You can transfer either your local or existing toll free number at no charge to HoverNetworks. So keep your existing local or toll free number and not pay any fees to transfer either of them.
All the Features of a Hosted PBX: Get all the standard features of a hosted pbx such as voicemail, call forwarding, call waiting, call blocking, caller id, call queueing, hunt groups and a whole lot more.
Dislikes
No Vanity Numbers: Just like Nextiva, HoverNetworks currently does not offer Vanity Numbers. According to Darren Ascone, CEO, it is their belief that most small businesses don’t ask for Vanity Numbers. However from what we’ve seen this isn’t the case, and we feel that not offering vanity numbers does put them at a bit of a disadvantage in regards to their competitors who do offer this service.
No True 800 Numbers Available: This actually is an on-going issue for all toll free number providers. Rarely do true 800 numbers become available and when a pool of numbers does become available they usually go very quickly. So in reality this isn’t only a HoverNetworks issue, you may also find that getting a true 800 number may be difficult from any provider. HoverNetworks just doesn’t even try to make them available – rather you can select from the typical 877, 866, 855 prefixes.
No "Call-from-Web/Click-to-Call" Feature: With most companies having some form of web presence now, it is unfortunate that HoverNetworks doesn’t have a "call from web" feature that allows website visitors to quickly and easily connect with merchants via phone while visiting that merchants website. These "click to call" buttons can create impressive increases in conversion when placed correctly on a merchants website. They can also provide additional "buyer confidence" in the shopper that may not be quite convinced yet.
Where to Buy
Summary
We like HoverNetworks fresh, aggressive, customer service focused approach to providing virtual phone systems. Their hosted pbx is a feature rich, robust system and competitively priced to make it affordable for the one person home office or the small office looking for all the features of a pbx without the cost! We feel missing features will be coming quickly as they ramp up. All in all, a great option that we are happy to add to our line-up of Virtual PBX providers.
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