Real Top Ten Reasons Why Small Businesses Should Turn Switch To Voip.


by Lisa Kaye - Date: 2007-04-04 - Word Count: 1446 Share This!

1. Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for new businesses or businesses in need of replacing their existing phone system. With a Hosted VoIP PBX companies get full use of a PBX without the costly expense of equipment, upgrades and maintenance. Small businesses can have the appearance of a large centralized business with a Hosted PBX by utilizing the span of features available.

2. No need to purchase new equipment or lose your investment in your current legacy system. VoIP providers over the course of time have spent so much in product development of their Hosted VoIP Solution that many of them are not offering SIP Trunking and many businesses do not realize the benefits of SIP trunking. SIP trunking allows businesses to keep their existing analog PBX and telephones. A VoIP gateway is installed behind the PBX and the gateway is responsible for converting clear and concise voice traffic from the PBX to the IP network.1

3. Lower Monthly Recurring Charges. Bundling voice and data on to one network provides one solution, one bill and one provider. Most VoIP providers offering unlimited local and long distance calling and a good bundled solution should provide a fast business class internet connection. The benefits to bundled services are that it maximizes the dollars a small to medium size business is spending on telecommunication services. Businesses deploying VoIP will also notice there are not any FCC mandated surcharges on their monthly bill. A PICC fee which is a long distance carrier imposed surcharge can be as much as $4 per line. EUCL is an Interstate Access Charge or surcharge and can be as much as $6 per line depending on your provider.

4. Over 70% of traditional phone bills are wrong. For years businesses have been paying for services that they did not subscribed to, understand or need. In fact when in doubt to this known fact it is best to reflect back to the ABC news story where AT&T charged an 82-year-old widow over $14,000 in "rent" over a course of 42 years for use of a rotary telephone. Some providers offer the value added service of reviewing your current phone bill and the errors it contains. Businesses are entitled to a full refund plus any incurred interest on the money owned depending on the state you reside. VoIP customers know ahead of time every month exactly how much their bill is going to be for all services except international calling. There is very little room for billing errors and crammed bills full of services not requested or required.

5. Cuts Operating Costs. VoIP solutions are software based and is easily updated, changed and expanded without further capital expense. The hosted PBX is completely maintenance free because there is no hardware. It is a virtual system. Unlike conventional legacy phone system that is hardware based. They are expensive to make changes to, maintain and require costly equipment purchases to expand calling capacity.

Businesses over the course of a year can spend a great deal of money on Mac's (moves, additions and changes) to their existing PBX. Every time a change is needed a technician must be dispatched unless you have an in house IT department that manages your PBX. With a VoIP solution it is self managed depending on your provider businesses can either access the admin via an online portal or for those who do not have the time or want to self manage they can send an email and changes to phone system are done in real time. These charges alone can save a company thousands of dollars a year.

6. Streamline Communications. With VoIP companies can take advantage of simple 3 digit transfer to any supported property or office. No matter if one office is in Boca Raton and the other office is in New York the call is transferred as if they were in the same building. Furthermore businesses can consolidate call answering from a central location too. Eliminate the need and responsibility of every office location having to manage their incoming calls with centralized call answering.
Employees can stay in constant contact with features such as "Find Me- Follow Me" where employees can designate where the system should try to contact them if not answered at their desk. Multiple phones can also ring simultaneously for example your office line, cell phone and home phone can all ring simultaneously so an anticipated call is never missed.

Employers have access to call logs to track customers call history and customer service issues and resolutions. Telecommuting from home is becoming more widespread and telecommuters can work from anywhere and appear to be at the corporate office to the outside as well as employees that travel a great deal.

7. Disaster Proof a hosted PBX phone system coupled with an IP telephone is disaster proof. Companies lost several thousand dollars because of the loss of communication during and after the hurricanes. The PBX is hosted off site in a secured facility with multiple back up systems and reroutes. Should power be knocked out for hours or days your traditional PBX system would not work, but your VoIP PBX system would continue answering and routing calls so employees may retrieve messages once electric is restored.

Should you need to evacuate employees can take their IP phones with them, drive to a safe destination and plug into any internet connection and be up and running as if they never left the office and it is business as usual.

8. QOS stands for "Quality of Service" gone are the days of dropped unclear calls. Business class VoIP maintains a high QOS and technological advances in IP telephony transportation have made Internet calling as good as or better than normal PSTN connections. This is true for high speed Broadband connections and dedicated internet connections, whereas dial up services have some way to go before delivering the quality of PSTN calling.

QOS stands for Quality of Service and it is what sets apart business class VoIP from the residential services your may have experienced or heard nightmares about. Business class DSL is a connection on a tier 1 provider, this ensures the speed of the internet is constant and high quality to prevent static and latency that causes dropped calls and bad connections. Your VoIP is only going to be as good as your internet connection no matter what you have been told.

9. Hybrid VoIP Solution. There are a few VoIP providers that deploy a hybrid VoIP solution that automatically reserves or routes resources for optimal bandwidth allocation. The system automatically ensures that the VoIP call has the bandwidth needed allocated from point to point before the conversation takes place. The second is prioritization: Here, the end point suggests a priority on the packets and each router decides if it will honor this request or not. Voice will always take a priority over data. A hybrid solution furthermore distributes the bandwidth that on a traditional system is not dynamic or flexible. If you only need 2 voice calls at the moment the extra bandwidth is allocated to full data use until it is needed for voice. A traditional voice system never allows companies to tap into the bandwidth that sometimes sits dormant.

A hybrid VoIP solution also enables businesses that want to integrate analog and IP analog or IP
provide a fail over in case the electricity were to go out. In the event it does calls are then routed across the traditional telephone network service automatically so there is no loss of communication for your company.

10. Multi Layered Security Unlike traditional service VoIP attacks are prevented because of the multitude of layers and encryptions placed within the provider's networks. The layered security approach not only prevents attacks, but the probability that if broached it will meaningfully reduce the probability that the attack succeeds. With traditional phone services anyone with the proper tool can access your conversation from your dmarc anyone can access your voice services.

The first layer starts with using a dedicated circuit or business class only DSL. In most instances the Cisco 827-4V Router is used. The router provides a built-in firewall and secure VPN. The second layer of protection is with the VoIP provider's secured randomly generated encrypted network security. The encryption changes randomly and it has been estimated it would take someone close to 100 years to crack the code. However if the encryption is cracked the code would have changed millions if not trillions of times rendering the cracked code obsolete. Information must then pass through the provider network and firewalls. The provider network automatically knows which packets have permissions and parameters set before sent to businesses. Your company firewall should be in place as the final layer in VoIP attacks.

Related Tags: small business, technology, business, voip, voice over ip, ip telephony, communications, broadband internet, telecommunications, telephones

Lisa Kaye has been in Telecom for 12 years. She currently is the Director of Operation for " alt="Intralinx " />

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