The telephone switchboard and landline desk phone may not be dead, but they are becoming relics of the past along with office ashtrays and typewriters.
Businesses are increasingly turning away from PBX (private branch exchange) phone systems and toward VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) telephony, which enables conversations to travel as data across the Internet. By 2013 more than 80 percent of businesses will use VoIP, according to research by In-Stat.
Is VoIP Right for You?
VoIP can be ideal if your company handles many calls among multiple people, has mobile employees, or juggles satellite offices. Implementing the technology can help to shrink or eliminate the cost of long-distance and conference calls.
In addition, VoIP provides the flexibility to manage calls as you would other data. For example, a caller’s contact information may pop up on a Web-based dashboard or on a smartphone with a VoIP app when they ring your number. Depending on the service, voice calls can be translated to text that you read via e-mail or on a smartphone. Many VoIP services extend beyond voice to encompass instant messaging, virtual meetings, and videoconferencing. VoIP is key to unified communications efforts to integrate all of your correspondence into a single, digital hub.
If you already have a local or wide-area network, then you’ve already laid much of the groundwork. Make sure that your organization has enough bandwidth–a T1 line or better–before trying to cram your calls through a sluggish data pipeline.
VoIP Options
What kind of VoIP system you need depends on the size of your business and the number of locations. One person working at home probably doesn’t need much more than a consumer service such as Skype, ViaTalk, or Vonage. Just sign up, download the app, don a headset, and you’re good to go. Skype even offers encryption to keep calls private. Mobile VoIP apps can help you rein in cell phone bills.
But that’s not enough if you need individual phone lines for your employees. In this case, the many VoIP options essentially break down to either a hosted or on-site VoIP service. Hybrid services can blend the two, letting you combine old and new equipment.
Hosted VoIP leaves the heavy technology lifting to another company. It can help a small business appear bigger by offering PBX-style features, such as individual phone numbers for employees and call transfers, even to workers away from their desks. It can include toll-free numbers and integration with e-mail and faxing software. You basically download software and buy or lease IP phones for each user. There’s little need to invest in expensive equipment or to pay an IT pro for ongoing support. 8×8 and Speakeasy are among the many companies offering hosted VoIP. Your Internet service provider may offer options for VoIP service, as well.
By contrast, on-premise VoIP will offer all the features of a hosted service, with the option for fine-tuning. Avaya and Cisco are among the vendors to consider. For this VoIP PBX option, however, you’ll have to handle all the hardware and the calls, so it’s time to call an IT pro. If you’re upgrading from a pure PBX system, a VoIP gateway device on your network can make the transition. Once you have VoIP going on your network, you should optimize your router and your network to prioritize traffic to ensure high call quality.
Before You Leap
As for the drawbacks, a hosted service may lack the customization you crave, or charge you extra fees for adding features or new users; it could leave you high and dry if the company goes belly-up, too. With on-premise VoIP, you may suffer the obvious headaches and costs of managing any tech equipment in-house, including a large up-front investment.
Before you make the big VoIP switch-over, look closely at the numbers. Compare what you currently spend per user on phone service with what you project to pay a VoIP provider. Read the fine print of any service to determine any hidden fees. Figure in hardware and ongoing maintenance, and don’t forget to add the cost of a faster Internet connection, if you need one.
VoIP offers features similar to traditional telephone systems such as voicemail, call forwarding, call waiting, caller ID, call barring, etc VoIP also offers new features not present in traditional telephone systems, for example, the ability to have a virtual number – a phone number from any available area code.
it comes to hosted VoIP, there are really two major considerations for any small business:1. How good is my LAN / WAN connectivity?2. How good is the service provider I’m choosing?In our experience, failure to address #1 is the root cause of most people who have any kind of issue with hosted VoIP. Simply put, these are businesses that are trying to do too much with too little bandwidth and whose network isn’t configured to give VoIP packets appropriate weighting to mitigate voice latency/QoS issues. They’re on a basic T1 serving a large office of people that are streaming video, browsing the web, and downloading large files, and now they want to pile on a few dozen concurrent calls without kicking up their broadband a notch. No, that’s not going to work.As far as #2, I can only say we make it a point to resolve these issues prior to any installation, while other hosted providers seem content to dodge accountability and let customers languish in mediocre / unsatisfactory service. It’s not hard for our highly-trained installers to look at a customer’s network and say, You need a better Internet connection before I’m going to install fifty VoIP phones here. Or, Your routers are basically tinkertoys. They don’t have the features you need to reliably run voice and data over the same network. I recommend these ones. Or, when appropriate, We offer an MPLS solution. And then show the customer how that affects their TCO and let them use that information to make the decision that’s best for their business.When it comes to features, I don’t know that any given on-site PBX has a leg up over all hosted VoIP solutions. FreedomIQ, for example, is a very feature-rich service. I’d venture to say one of the better platforms in the hosted VoIP market. While other providers don’t have / nickle-and-dime over basic features like call queues, we throw in everything but the kitchen sink. We’d throw that in, too, if we had a few lying around.I am familiar with Digium / Asterisk, and I think you keyed in on it’s most important value with not proprietary. The biggest flaw with most hosted VoIP providers is that they don’t own their technology. They bought it or are leasing it from somebody who stopped developing it ages ago. They’re working off the same platform as they were 5 years ago, and the same platform they’ll be working from 5 years in the future (if they’re still in business). With FreedomIQ, that’s not the case. We built our platform from the ground up. It’s completely flexible and constantly improving, because we possess the tools and resources to change anything we need to change at any time. That means new features, new functionality, integration with 3rd-party applications, etc.There are certainly a lot of fly-by-night hosted VoIP providers out there leaving a wake of angry customers. Believe me, we deal with them, too. This is because most hosted providers are marketing companies first and technology companies second, so they react to issues like QoS with obfuscation and misinformation instead of proactive solutions. That makes their technical support (outsourced, usually, unlike FreedomIQ) a distant third. We’ve made our mark in the industry by doing the opposite: taking care of our technology and our customers first, and letting that speak for itself. If that means spending more money on developers and server architecture than creating hollow marketing buzz, well, so be it.I appreciate the comment. These are real issues facing customers making an important buying decision. With time, hopefully the more reputable companies will come to the forefront. I can already say the hosted market is better off than we were a few years ago. Until then, however, it’s largely an exercise in education and integrity. With rapidly increasing market share, I can’t help but think we’re doing something right.