In the US & Canada the idea of “long distance” or pay per minute with differing costs between landlines and mobile numbers 
doesn’t really exist. Minutes are minutes and in most cases your customer is on a plan where it doesn’t even matter since there isn’t a costing difference. In other countries in Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and others that is not the case. In these other regions calling a landline costs differently than calling a mobile number. If you don’t believe me try asking your current dial tone vendor for a list of international rates and you will find that in many countries rates to land lines are more reasonable where rates to mobile networks are much higher and even vary between one mobile network to the other.
This is a where GSM gateways can be a great help. What is a GSM gateway? Basically, it’s the ability to take a SIM card from a cell provider in your area and connect it to a device which can then connect back to the phone system and be used for incoming and outgoing calls. That means you can be smart with routing rules and make calls to mobile networks from a “mobile line” which really cuts out the costing factors that make things expensive. At BVoIP, we have successfully connected GSM gateways that live in region back to CloudPBX with BVoIP. So even though the device is on-prem we can still connect it back to the cloud for dial tone.
There are some gotcha’s:
- You might want to disable cell phone voicemail for the mobile lines that you connect to the GSM gateway to prevent calls that come in when the line is in use from going to a voicemail box you are not monitoring
- There is usually not a hunting option where calls can go to another line if there is an active call. Sometimes it can be made to work sometimes it can’t. This is cell provider feature and not all cell providers are created equal.
- You may have to setup multiple mobile lines and dedicate incoming lines vs outgoing lines depending on how much mobile call traffic you have.
- You can’t override caller ID so when you call outbound the number associated with that mobile line is what will appear when you call out.
- If the gateway goes offline for whatever reason, unless your mobile provider has some sort of failover option then the call will go to either voicemail or a busy signal.
So if you have a customer that can benefit from this option rest assured it can be done and work seamlessly with BVoIP.
