Here’s the honest version of how this started.
If you ran a business with more than one location, your options for a phone system were both bad. You could buy the hardware, which meant a large check up front and a closet full of equipment that someone had to understand. Or you could rent it, and watch charges you didn’t choose show up on every bill, forever. Neither of those is a real choice. They’re just two ways to pay more than the thing is worth.
Meanwhile residential VoIP was working fine. People were making calls over the Internet at home without a closet full of anything. The hunch was simple: the same thing should work for a business, if somebody would sit down with each customer, look at their actual network, and set it up properly, then put the controls on a web page where the customer could reach them.
That’s what we did. Before long we were hosting phone systems for a handful of customers across Oregon, and the idea held. Everything below came from pulling on that same thread.
How we got here
Each of these started as a customer asking for something we didn’t have yet.
2005
The first hosted phone systems.
One customer, one network at a time. We adapted each business’s network for VoIP by hand and gave them a web interface instead of a closet. That is still the whole idea.
2010
NocTel Communications, Inc.
Five years in, the idea had earned a real foundation. We re-engineered the platform for what it was actually being asked to do, grew it well past its first few customers, and incorporated.
2016
The OETC contract.
Awarded through a competitively bid RFP for voice services. Schools started subscribing, and a lot of what we build now traces back to what they needed.
2017
NocTel Alert, now Intercoms.
First deployment. IP-based paging tied directly into NocTel Talk, the phone system: scheduled announcements, bell schedules, lockdowns. Built on Algo endpoints, which are still our primary intercom integration. Schools asked for it, so we built it.
2018
NocTel Flow.
Call flows, queues, and agent configuration a supervisor can change themselves, from anywhere, without filing a ticket with us first.
2018
Fiber in the ground in Washougal.
Fiber to the home, in rural neighborhoods other providers had passed over. It grew into NocTel Fiber and it is still growing, neighborhood by neighborhood.
2019
NocTel Insight.
Reporting across everything we run, because “is this actually working?” deserves an answer with numbers behind it.
2019
NocTel Go.
Your extension, off your desk. It landed just before it turned out that everybody was going to need exactly that.
2020-21
We stayed on the phone.
Schools went remote, then came back. Offices emptied and refilled. Mostly what we did was answer when people called, and keep the systems up while everything else moved.
2022
The OETC contract, won again.
Not a rubber-stamp renewal. It went back out to competitive bid and we won it a second time, against the field, from districts that had spent six years living with the thing they were re-buying.
2023
We start over, on purpose.
Not a new coat of paint on the old platform. Eighteen years of additions had earned a foundation designed for all of them at once, so we began rebuilding it into what became NocTel Desk.
2024
NocTel Now, designed.
Panic notification buttons and badges that work without WiFi. Drawn up against the foundation being laid rather than bolted onto the old one.
2025
Drop.now, because fax will not die.
Fax survives in healthcare, law, and government for one honest reason: you need to put a document in someone’s hands when they have no account with you, and every modern alternative starts by asking them to make one. So people keep a fax line alive for that single job. We got tired of watching it, and of there being no good answer, so we built one. NocTel Drop is end-to-end encrypted, needs no signup from either side, and the file expires on its own.
2025
NocTel Screens, online.
After half a dozen years of prototyping screens in the restaurant industry, where a board showing the wrong thing at the wrong moment costs somebody real money, it shipped. Screens runs on the same tools and routing as Talk, Now, and Alert rather than beside them, which is what makes connecting them easy: a panic button can change what a sign says, a bell schedule can drive a display, and a call can put something on a screen. Underneath, they were never separate systems to wire together.
2026
NocTel Desk arrives.
Our new flagship, and what the previous three years were for. Longtime customers are moving onto it as we go, so the people who have been with us the longest end up with more of what we build, reachable from one place instead of several. A bell schedule, a panic button, and a phone call are all decisions about who should be told what and when, and Desk finally treats them that way.
2027
Ten products in one system.
Four more arrive, one a quarter, each landing inside Desk rather than beside it. That is the whole return on rebuilding the foundation instead of patching it.
One belief runs under all of it: services exist to be used by a lot of people. That means they shouldn’t be priced out of reach, and they shouldn’t be built only for how things happen to work today.
That’s the short version. The long version is written down and dated: month-to-month, hardware you own, and no charging you for things you should be able to do yourself. We update it when it changes. Read how we think about this work.
A note from usIf you’re stuck with something that doesn’t work well, that’s usually where we get interested.
Almost forty years of this, across racetracks, radio stations, school districts, and rural neighborhoods, keeps landing on the same idea: find people who are putting up with something worse than they should have to, and build them something better. If that sounds like your phones, your buildings, or your Internet, we’d genuinely like to hear about it. Call 360.837.7400, or tell us what you’re working with.
Cory Schruth, on behalf of the NocTel team