An Optimum Business Phone Alternative, Local Brooklyn Provider for NYC Offices

If your NYC office is on Optimum Business Voice or Hosted Voice, you've experienced the cable-bundle structure and the limits of national dispatch. There's a local alternative. Brooklyn-based, no Internet bundle required, real NYC techs.

Why NYC offices are leaving Optimum

Optimum (owned by Altice USA, formerly known as Cablevision in NYC) is one of the major cable providers serving the tri-state area. In NYC, Optimum has strong coverage in parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Their Business Voice products, both the traditional cable phone service and the newer Hosted Voice cloud PBX, ship bundled with Optimum Internet.

The same structural patterns that drive offices away from other cable carriers also apply here:

1. Bundle structure controls the pricing. Optimum's advertised rates assume you're taking Internet from them. Standalone phone pricing is less transparent and typically higher. The bundle creates dependency, changing your Internet provider later means renegotiating phone service too.
2. Cable Internet dependency. Optimum Business Voice runs over the Optimum Internet connection. When the Internet has an outage at your address, the phones go down too. Phone reliability becomes a function of Internet reliability.
3. National dispatch model. Optimum handles field service through a national dispatch system. Different techs may show up across repeat visits, and arrivals don't always hit scheduled times. Accountability is distributed across the dispatch system rather than tied to a person you can reach directly.
4. Limited modern features on the lower tiers. Optimum Business Hosted Voice has competitive features at its higher tiers, but the lower-priced plans miss things like queue callback, hot desking, and full mobile/desktop softphone parity.

Two paths if Optimum is your only good Internet option

Many NYC buildings, especially older commercial buildings in parts of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island, have Optimum as the only fiber-coax option, with the alternative being limited DSL or no broadband at all. If that's your situation, you might think you're stuck with the Optimum bundle. You're not. There are two clean paths:

Path 1: Keep Optimum Internet, switch only the phone

LightningVoIP is a standalone phone service. Your Internet provider is your choice. Keep Optimum Internet (or any other Internet provider) and move the phone service to us. The two services are now independent:

• Optimum bills you for Internet only
• We bill you for phone service only
• If you ever want to switch Internet, the phone service stays with us
• Renegotiation on each contract is independent, no all-or-nothing

Path 2: Add 5G LTE phone failover for outage resilience

If you're worried about Optimum Internet outages affecting your phones (a real concern for some NYC buildings), we can add 5G LTE failover as a phone backup. When the Internet goes down, the phones route over cellular until Internet comes back. The phone system stays operational independent of what's happening with your Internet provider.

This is a feature cable-carrier phone services typically can't offer because their phones ARE the Internet, there's no separate cellular path.

What LightningVoIP includes compared to Optimum Hosted Voice

Comparison against Optimum's Hosted Voice product (the more modern of their two phone offerings):

Switching from Optimum, what the migration actually looks like

Week 1, Discovery

We come on-site to review your existing Optimum setup. Inventory lines, extensions, call routing, voicemail boxes, any custom IVR programming. Confirm your Optimum service terms, many offices are on multi-year contracts, so we map out the early-termination math if relevant. Provide a fixed quote and a written migration plan.

Week 2, Parallel build

Provision the new cloud PBX with all your extensions and call flows matching your current Optimum setup. New IP desk phones programmed for your team. Your Optimum service keeps running normally, no caller-facing changes yet.

Week 3, Number porting and cutover

Number porting from Optimum takes 7 business days on the carrier side. We schedule cutover for a weekday morning. Your Optimum service stays active until your new line is verified working. Cutover window is typically under 15 minutes of perceptible activity.

Week 4, Training and tuning

On-site session with your team. Mobile app training, IVR tuning based on real call patterns. After this, you reach a real engineer directly for support, the same small local team every time.

When NOT to switch

Honest framing, we'll tell you straight if any of these apply:

• You're locked into a long Optimum contract with steep early termination fees. We do the math with you, sometimes the right answer is to wait for renewal date. Other times we can credit your LightningVoIP bill over time to offset the Optimum exit fee, you'd be in a short non-renewing contract with us during the credit period, then month-to-month after.
• You're deeply happy with the bundled billing convenience. If having one combined bill matters more than the structural drawbacks, that's a legitimate preference.
• Your office is outside our service area. We focus on NYC's 5 boroughs. If you have operations across the tri-state (NJ, CT, upstate NY), national coverage may matter more than local presence.
• Optimum Hosted Voice's higher tiers are giving you everything you need. The premium tiers do have competitive feature sets. If the price is acceptable and the support has been fine, switching may not pencil.

Our typical fit: the NYC small office on Optimum Business Voice or Hosted Voice that wants standalone phone service, real local support, and modern features at predictable monthly pricing.

Pricing

Published pricing, no quote forms, no "call for details":

• Business plan: $29.99 per user per month. Includes new IP desk phone, full cloud PBX, mobile and desktop apps, unlimited US and Canada calling. Fits most NYC small offices.
• Standard plan: $19.99 per line per month. For very small offices with one or two lines.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for multi-location operations or specific compliance needs.

See our pricing page for full details, or learn more about our NYC service.

Related, other carrier alternatives

If you're shopping carriers more broadly:

• Verizon Business Phone Alternative, for offices on Verizon copper or Fios voice
• Spectrum Business Voice Alternative, for offices on Spectrum

Frequently asked questions