Why VoIP is the Right choice for Small Business Phone Systems?

Regardless of your organization’s employee count, number of locations, and budget, VoIP is the absolute right choice for small business phone systems.  There are a number of reasons why a small business might be looking to upgrade, migrate, or purchase their first phone system. Either way, a small business should only be looking into a VoIP system.  Do NOT purchase a digital or a hybrid system (digital system with some VoIP capabilities).  Why? Many reasons:

• The benefits of VoIP in a small business phone system are invaluable.
• Global presence management (the ability to see if users are on the phone, in do not disturb, etc – regardless of their communication device or location).
• Remote employees can answer calls, transfer, and park; see calls in queue, etc – regardless of their location!  We’re seeing more and more small businesses use small business phone system technology to build “virtual” offices to keep professional appearances up and costs down.
• Find-me / follow-me and call forwarding:  Take your extension anywhere and stay connected.  This is great for mobile employees and road warriors.
• Manage the phone system YOURSELF from anywhere– with simple web-based administration tools.  Why pay the local phone “tech” lots of money to add a phone, delete a voicemail box, etc?
• Get your own phone number – with a Direct Inward Dial (DID) number.
• Stay in touch – get your voicemails emailed to your mobile device.

These are just a few features available in the right small business phone system.

Other reasons:

• A VOIP small business phone system potentially costs the same as a digital or hybrid one.
• No research and develop is being spent on legacy digital OR hybrid technology.  Don’t be caught in a situation where your equipment is no longer manufactured or supported in a few years.
• If designed right, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is MUCH less with a VoIP small business phone system.  Features like web-based administration, simplified wiring (like a computer, just unplug and plug the phone into another jack if you want to move it), and ability take advantage of SIP trunking over inexpensive Internet connections – are all just a few reasons a VOIP small business phone system can save you considerably over time.

Two Types of SIP Providers

In my experience, I’ve come across two types of organizations who sell SIP service.

Provider 1

This is a traditional LEC or CLEC who offers SIP as a “me too” service—or in addition to their traditional analog lines, PRIs, Internet T1′s, MPLS, etc. Often they will require that you purchase their T1, provision 23 to 30 SIP trunks on it, and charge you the same as a standard PRI. Additionally, they can’t / won’t offer the additional flexibility of SIP trunks (porting numbers across calling areas, fail over, etc.) I haven’t seen very many of these products sold by agents or direct sales reps. It makes sense to me. Why sell an unknown (SIP) when you can sell the good old all mighty PRI? After all, there are no cost savings advantages. Note, this is me generalizing. It’s not the case with all SIP providers. In fact, I’ve recently worked with one that requires you to use their T1, but will offer the porting flexibility and cost savings benefits of SIP (.01/minute LD, 40+SIP trunks on the T1, etc).

No wonder less than 10% of businesses have moved over to SIP. It’s not because it doesn’t work, it’s because they don’t know about it! Your average telecommunications sales representative isn’t educating their customers.

Provider 2

The second type of SIP provider breaks the traditional mold of telecommunications providers. They can offer SIP trunks over your own bandwidth, can port and source numbers from most areas of the country, can provide fail-over, and are usually MUCH less than your traditional CLECs and LECs. [ read more ]

SIP Trunks Without an IP PBX

Can this be done? We’re doing it. By using third party equipment, we can terminate SIP trunks and convert back to traditional PRI signaling. This extends the benefits of SIP trunking to those that don’t want to upgrade their PBX yet.

Don’t get me wrong – if your organization needs to upgrade their phone system, but doesn’t have the money, by all means use the 40% – 70% SAVINGS associated with SIP trunks to justify the purchase. We’ll often wrap the phone system acquisition into a lease, convert the customer to SIP trunks, and still save the customer money AFTER the lease payment.

Sorry, back to converting SIP trunks to traditional connections…So far it works great. Depending on the scenario, it’s solved some other issues too. In our testing, we’ve realized that  this SIP conversion  equipment drastically speeds up the fail-over between two Internet connections. That’s because this equipment negotiates between the two Internet connections and reestablishes SIP trunking on the backup should the primary fail. In some cases, we were on a live call when we killed the primary Internet connection and didn’t drop the call! Other times we dropped the call but the SIP trunks were back up within seconds. Ask your traditional PRI provider to do that! [ read more ]

General introduction to SIP, VoIP, and internet phone systems

I’ve been on the technical side of telephony for over 15 years now – beginning in tactical military communications and phone systems.  As you can imagine, I’ve seen incredible changes occur with IP telephony, business phone systems, and VOIP in general.  Inflow Communications wanted to use this blog to give our readers a high-level introduction to VOIP technology and how it has emerged to what we see today.  I figured the best way to do this was to give you a glimpse into my own journey down the business telephone system and VOIP road.  Note that this might not be an accurate depiction of the history of the telephone system; this is merely my own experience.

Before me:

Business telephone systems often consisted of multiple analog lines from the Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) to each basic, analog business telephone.  Often times, the LEC provided PBX-type functionality (transfer, hold, etc).  As you can imagine, this was very expensive because businesses had to pay for a phone line for EACH telephone, even if it wasn’t being used.  Additionally, every internal phone-to-phone call had to go through the all mighty LEC (Bell).

The PBX (Private Branch Exchange) and Key System:

A PBX or key system is a piece of equipment resides at the businesses location and centrally connects business telephones to each other and the telephone company (Public Switched Telephone Network or PSTN).  It usually consists of multiple connections or “ports” that were hard wired to telephone cabling that connected to proprietary digital business telephones and ports that connected to analog lines from the telephone company. This type of business telephone system equipment allowed businesses to have free phone-to-phone calling within a business and connectivity to the outside world.  A one-to-one ratio between the number of outside PSTN lines and telephones was not required either.  This is because a business could estimate the number of simultaneous inbound and outbound calls at any given time and “right-fit” their number of lines to accommodate that.  So a business that previously had 100 phones – and subsequently 100 phone lines could now pair their number of phone lines down to 24 (for example).  As you can imagine, with phone lines at $30 each, the cost savings were huge.  Additionally, PBX systems could offer businesses features like direct extension dialing, hunt groups, and voicemail.  Traditionally PBX or business phone system manufactures were AT&T (which became Lucent and is now Avaya), Nortel, Tadiran, Executone, etc.

The T1 and PRI:

Using digital Time Division Multiplex (TDM) technology, phone service providers could now place up to 23 or 24 phone lines on one wire.  Businesses that were paying $30+ per analog line and had over 12 lines could now replace those analog lines with a PRI and save money.   The PBX would need to be equipped with a T1 or PRI card.  A T1 traditionally accommodates 24 lines or channels; a PRI (Primary Rate Interface) accommodates up to 23 lines or channels with one channel being used for information transfer like caller ID.

This post is part 1 of a 2-part series. Part 2 will be posted on Thursday.

SIP: How to save money on phone bills?

I get so excited about the technology, how to deploy it, what it looks like in a fail-over scenario, etc.  I often forget to talk about how to use SIP to save money on phone bills.    Cost-savings related to SIP is the number one reason why our ShoreTel and Allworx business is flourishing in this economy.  It is also the reason why my company is growing rapidly.   Once people can get their head around this concept – the light goes on!  SIP trunks can save a business 40% to 70% on their phone bills!  So without spewing out a brochure to you, I’ll talk to the real-world experiences we’ve come across and implemented and how to save money on phone bills. [ read more ]