Your business phone system,
done right.
VoIP phone systems designed and installed for Southern Ontario businesses — Yealink and Fanvil hardware, carrier-agnostic SIP, full programming included, and ongoing support when you need it.
Installed. Programmed. Supported.
A phone system that just works.
From day one.
Most businesses inherit a phone system nobody understands. We replace that with a properly configured VoIP system — trained staff, documented extensions, and a support line when something needs changing.
From survey to first call
Site Survey & Requirements
We assess your call volume, extension count, locations, and existing cabling and internet infrastructure. You get a clear proposal before any work starts.
System Design & Installation
We configure the PBX, install Yealink or Fanvil desk phones, set up SIP trunks, program the auto-attendant, and test every extension before handover.
Training & Ongoing Support
Staff training, admin credentials, and full documentation. Post-installation support for adds, moves, and changes — so the system stays current as your business grows.
Everything in one phone system
IP Desk Phones
Yealink and Fanvil hardware — PoE-powered, HD voice, colour displays, and full enterprise feature sets. Business-grade hardware, not consumer VoIP adapters.
Auto-Attendant & IVR
Multi-level menus, business hours routing, after-hours handling, and holiday schedules. Callers reach the right person without a receptionist.
Voicemail to Email
Voicemail messages delivered as MP3 attachments to your inbox — with optional transcription. Never miss a message, even when away from your desk.
Call Recording
On-demand and automatic call recording, stored locally or in the cloud. Essential for compliance, quality control, and dispute resolution.
SIP Trunking & Number Porting
Carrier-agnostic SIP trunking — we work with any Canadian SIP provider. Port your existing business numbers with zero interruption to service.
Multi-Site & Branch Office
Unified dial plan across all locations — extension-to-extension calls between offices, shared voicemail, and centralised administration from a single portal.
Phone systems get replaced for three reasons.
Almost nobody changes a phone system because they want new phones. Something has failed, something has grown, or you're moving. Here's where most of our phone work starts.
The business on a key system nobody understands
- What brought you here
- There's a beige box on the wall of the back room with a fan in it. The person who programmed it retired. To change the after-hours greeting you have to call someone who charges to come out, and last time he said parts were getting hard to find.
- What you're actually worried about
- That the box finally dies on a Friday and you spend a week unable to take calls on the number that's printed on every truck, invoice and sign you own.
We migrate you off it without losing the number, and we hand you the greeting, the hours schedule and the ring groups in a portal you can change yourself. For a business this size, hosted is almost always the right answer — there's no reason to own a box in a closet again.
The multi-site or hybrid team whose calls don't route
- What brought you here
- Head office picks up a call meant for the second branch. Half your staff work from home and are giving out mobile numbers. Someone rings the main line at 5:10pm and it rings out into an empty office instead of reaching the person on late shift.
- What you're actually worried about
- Not the technology — the calls you never hear about. The customer who rang once, got nowhere, and rang a competitor instead.
We design the dial plan before we touch hardware: who rings first, who rings next, what happens after hours, how a branch reaches a branch, and what a remote person's softphone does when they're not at a desk. One extension range across all sites, one set of hours, one place to change it.
The operator moving premises or opening a second site
- What brought you here
- You've signed a lease. There's a date, a fit-out, and a phone number you cannot afford to lose in the middle of it. Or you're opening a second location and want it to behave like part of the same business rather than a separate company.
- What you're actually worried about
- Dead air on moving week — the number ported late, the internet not live, and your customers hearing a disconnection message during the busiest fortnight of your year.
We sequence porting against your internet install date rather than your moving date, and we keep the old path live until the new one is proven. Moves are also the natural point to decide hosted versus on-premise, because it's the one time the physical infrastructure is being touched anyway.
What a phone system change looks like from your side
The install day is the easy part. The weeks before it — deciding the routing and getting the numbers moved — are where the work and the risk sit.
Call flow and site review
We map how calls should behave, count the positions and what kind of phone each one needs, check your internet links and your network gear, and find every analog device still hiding on a copper line — fax, elevator phone, alarm dialler, door entry, lift-lobby handset, gate intercom. We also look at whether your cabling can carry the phones and power them.
Bring a recent phone bill and, if you have them, the account numbers and the name the service is billed under. Also decide who genuinely needs a desk phone: paying for a handset on a desk nobody sits at is the most common way this project gets more expensive than it needed to be.
Design, model choice, fixed quote
You get a written call flow, a per-position handset list with the model and why, a recommendation on hosted, on-premise or hybrid with the reasoning stated plainly, anything the network needs before install, and a fixed price.
Approve the call flow, including the after-hours and holiday behaviour. This is the decision that most affects whether people are happy with the system in six months, and it's easier to change on paper than after forty people have learned it.
Number porting submitted
We submit the port with the losing carrier, chase rejections, and hold a firm port date. The new system is built and tested on temporary numbers in parallel, so nothing is being configured on the day the numbers move.
Provide a recent full bill and sign the authorisation exactly as the account is registered. Ports are usually rejected for administrative reasons — a mismatched business name, an address that was updated on one system and not another, or an account with an outstanding balance. Also do not cancel your existing service. Cancelling before the port completes is how numbers get lost permanently.
Hardware, programming, cutover
We place and register every handset, build the auto-attendant, ring groups, voicemail and hours schedules, connect the analog devices that have to keep working, register the service address for emergency calling on every location and confirm it, then cut the numbers across and test each path by actually ringing it.
Have the internet service live and the desks accessible, and tell us the quietest window on the day. Cutover itself takes minutes; we'd rather do it at 7am than during your busiest hour.
Training and the first two weeks
We train your staff on the handset and the mobile or desktop app, show whoever administers it how to change a greeting, add an extension and adjust the hours, and stay close for the first fortnight while the real call patterns show up. Adjustments in that window are part of the job.
Nominate one internal administrator and have them present for the training. Every business that's happy with its phone system a year later has one person who knows how to change the greeting without calling anybody.
Have this ready and the job goes faster
- A recent, complete phone bill for every number you want to keep, including the account name and address as billed
- A list of every number in use — main line, direct lines, fax, the one on the old sign nobody rings any more
- Your intended call flow: who answers first, who's next, what happens after hours and on holidays
- Every analog device on a copper line — fax, elevator, alarm panel, door phone, gate intercom
- The exact civic address of each site, for emergency-call location registration
- Names, extensions and email addresses for everyone getting a phone or a softphone
- Confirmation your internet service is installed and live at the new address before the port date
Why a phone quote isn't just handsets times seats
Two businesses with the same number of staff can get very different numbers. These are the factors that actually drive it.
How many handsets, and which tier
A warehouse phone that needs to ring loudly and dial four extensions is not the phone a receptionist needs with a side console showing who's on a call. Mixing tiers by role costs less than buying one good model for everyone, and works better. Staff who live in a headset or on a laptop may need no desk phone at all.
Hosted, on-premise, or hybrid
Hosted means no hardware beyond the phones and a predictable monthly fee — right for most offices under a few dozen seats and anyone with staff spread across locations. On-premise means owning the system outright, which can make sense at higher seat counts, on sites with heavy call-centre requirements, or where a specific integration demands it. Hybrid keeps a local system for a site with poor internet or legacy equipment while giving remote staff a cloud experience. We'll tell you which one you are; most businesses that ask us this are hosted.
How complicated the porting is
One main number from a single carrier is straightforward. Numbers split across two carriers, a mix of lines and blocks, a business name that changed since the account opened, or a number bundled with an internet service all add coordination and time. It rarely changes the hardware cost; it changes how long the project takes and how much chasing it involves.
Whether your network is ready
Phones need cabling, switch ports and power to each position, and enough upstream bandwidth with voice prioritised over everything else. If there's structured cabling and a PoE switch with capacity, we plug in. If phones would be sharing a consumer router with the guest Wi-Fi, the network work becomes part of the project — and it's worth doing, because almost every complaint about voice quality traces back to it.
Multi-site routing and shared behaviour
Two offices that each want their own number and their own greeting are two small systems. Two offices behaving as one business — shared extension range, calls overflowing between sites, one directory, one set of hours, a receptionist covering both — takes more design and more testing. It's usually worth it, but it isn't free.
The analog devices that still have to work
Fax machines, elevator phones, alarm diallers, door entry panels and gate intercoms often live on copper lines nobody has thought about in years. Each one needs a decision: keep a line, convert it with an adapter, or replace the device. Elevator and alarm connections in particular have requirements set by their own service providers and the building, so we confirm what each one needs for your site rather than assuming they'll behave like a desk phone.
We quote fixed after the call-flow review, with hardware, programming, porting and training in the price and the monthly service stated separately so you can see what's capital and what's recurring. If you've got a system that's only a few years old and the real problem is how it's programmed, we'll say so and reprogram it rather than sell you phones you don't need.
Answered before you have to ask
“What happens to my phones when the internet goes down?”
This is the right question and it has a real answer. With a hosted system, the handsets in the building stop working, but the calls don't have to stop — we configure failover so that if the system can't reach your phones, incoming calls automatically go to mobiles, to another site, or to voicemail, and staff can keep working from the mobile app on cellular data. For sites where losing calls isn't acceptable, a second internet link or a cellular backup at the router makes the failover invisible. A local on-premise system keeps internal extension-to-extension calling alive during an outage, which matters for some sites and is one of the reasons to consider hybrid.
“How risky is porting my number? I cannot lose it.”
Porting is well-trodden, but it fails for boring administrative reasons rather than technical ones — a business name that doesn't match the carrier's record, an old service address, an unpaid balance. We submit with a full recent bill, fix rejections before they cost you a week, and build and test the new system on temporary numbers first so that the port itself is a switch being flipped, not a configuration being attempted. The one rule we'll repeat until it's tedious: do not cancel your existing service. Cancel before the port completes and the number can be released permanently, and nobody can get it back.
“Do my old phones work with this?”
Sometimes. Recent IP handsets from mainstream manufacturers can often be re-provisioned onto a new platform, and if you have a room full of them we'll test one before recommending you replace the lot. Digital handsets tied to an old key system are a different matter — they only speak to the box they came with and can't be carried across. We'll tell you which camp yours are in at the site review, and reusing them is a genuine option, not a courtesy.
“How does 911 work if my calls go over the internet?”
It works, but only if the address on file is right, and that's an operational job rather than something you should assume happens by itself. We register the civic address of every site during setup, confirm it after cutover, and set the behaviour for a handset that's been moved to another location or is being used by someone at home. When you move a phone between sites or take one home, tell us — updating the registered location takes us minutes and is the sort of thing nobody thinks about until it matters.
“Am I locked in? Who owns the equipment?”
You buy the handsets outright and they're yours. We're carrier-agnostic, so the SIP service can move without replacing hardware, and the numbers are yours to port away — the same process we used to bring them in works in the other direction, and we won't obstruct it. What we ask for is being told, so we can hand over the configuration and the credentials properly instead of leaving the next provider to reverse-engineer your call flow.
“Half my staff work from home. Does that actually work?”
It's the part hosted systems genuinely do well. A remote person gets a desktop or mobile app with their office extension, so they're reachable on the main number, they dial out showing the business number instead of their mobile, and internal transfers work the same as they would in the office. What varies is their home internet, which we can't control — so for people whose calls have to be reliable, a desk phone at home on a decent connection is still better than an app on a laptop that's also on a video call.
How it stacks up
Telecom resellers lock you in. DIY systems require someone who knows what they're doing.
| Feature | RiowellPhone Systems | Vs.Telecom Reseller | Vs.DIY VoIP |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-site installation | Included | Extra charge | Self-managed |
| Hardware brands | Yealink & Fanvil | Vendor-locked | Any |
| SIP carrier | Carrier-agnostic | Often locked-in | Any |
| Programming & setup | Full configuration | Basic only | Self-managed |
| Ongoing support | Included | Break-fix only | None |
| Coverage area | All Southern Ontario | Varies | N/A |
Any business that relies on the phone
From a 3-person professional services office to a 150-employee distribution centre — if your business runs on phones, we can install and support it. All clients are commercial. We do not service residential.
Ready to replace your
phone system?
We'll assess your current setup, recommend the right hardware and carrier, and give you a fixed-price quote. No obligation.
Business phone systems in your city
Number porting, local carrier behaviour and on-site install scheduling vary by area. Pick your city for the local picture.
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