You might find yourself chained to an expensive phone contract, especially if you run a business, the cost of the phone hardware can be pricey if you need team conference calls, voicemail to email and other features.
What if I told you
- You could lose the annual contracts
- Reduce the costs of making and receiving calls to a minimum
- Use the same enterprise features that the largest companies in the world use for a fraction of the cost.
You need a VOIP system
VOIP stands for "Voice Over Internet Protocol" - It allows you to make and receive calls over the internet, if you've never heard of this before, then did you know the technology to do this is already built into Skype?
Skype allows you to make and receive calls to local and international numbers, you can buy a phone number and assign it to Skype so that people can contact you directly.
Moving up from Skype (which I would not recommend for business use due to quality) you have different types of provider you can help you which are laid out further down the article.
It takes very little bandwidth to use VOIP, as a rule of thumb if you budget 0.2 meg per phone call, which means if you have 10 phone calls happening at once, you will need 2.0 meg per second downloading and uploading at the same time.
- Hosted PBX
This means that your phones connect over the internet to your own or a providers hosted servers. There are many providers around the world offering hosted PBX, one of the more well known names in the UK is called "Vonage"
http://www.vonage.co.uk/
With this model, they supply you with the hardware, and a calling plan for a fixed price per month. All you need is a working internet connection.
- On site PBX with SIP Trunk
At your office you will have a server which talks to the phones and handles that for you. There are free phone system platforms out there and commercial software, if you want to have a go yourself then try the Asterisk phone system out:
http://www.asterisk.org/
Once you have your onsite server, you will need something called a "SIP Trunk" which you will need to rent from a provider, this gives you a connection over the internet from your office to the analogue ISDN network so you can make and receive calls.
Not all VOIP providers are equal.
You need to carefully research the solution you are going to purchase, since 2004 there has been an explosion in the number of companies able to provide VOIP services and there is quite a bit of revenue to be made in reselling these services.
It is possible to sign up to become a "Reseller" of a phone provider and you will not know if you are dealing with a reseller or a provider who owns their own network.
Make sure you are dealing with the right kind of provider or your business may suffer as a result.
The price of hardware
VOIP does bring massive cost savings when using phones but your existing phones might not be compatible with a VOIP system. So you will have to set aside some money for buying new phones, possibly a new router or switch to support it.
If you go to a VOIP provider, there is a very high chance they also sell or supply the hardware to you which leaves you in a difficult position.
They could quite easily persuade you to buy the more expensive hardware which doesn't have any real benefits to the businesses. Yet you are reliant on their expert advice for what to do next.
You have 2 options to help deal with this.
- Get a consultant
A consultant will help you choose the right hardware at the right price. They can also work with the provider on your behalf to ensure a stable migration from your old phones to the new phones. They are worth considering to add value to the project but if you don't want the additional expense, try the below option.
- Buy your VOIP from one company and the hardware from another
Focus on only buying a VOIP service from the provider, then the relationship is focused strictly to them providing you with the best VOIP option you can get, they don't spend any time trying to sell you hardware. By all means get a list of phones compatible with their platform first.
It might seem easier to go with one provider for hardware and services but every case is different. So you'll need to weigh the pros and cons accordingly.
If you have any questions or comments at all about VOIP, please leave them below in the comments box!
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