As Voice over Internet Protocol communication matures and high-speed Internet becomes cheap and ubiquitous, an increasing number of companies are abandoning conventional landlines and adopting VoIP. Companies not only market products or services, they also market themselves. No matter the size or type, every business should have the tools and solutions necessary to present themselves professionally, while maximizing their ability to work efficiently and stay connected with clients and co-workers.
While some small businesses may believe they can get by simply by using their smartphones for work purposes, even the smallest businesses can benefit from a central business phone system, as it presents a unified face to customers, employees, and partners.
Are the potential pitfalls worth the potential monetary rewards? I’ll walk you through the basics, go over the pros and cons, and take a look at three commercial VoIP services of varying complexity.
While it may be intuitive, mobile phone plans are simply not configured to offer the same business features that purpose-built business phone systems do. For example, mobile phones cannot provide a virtual receptionist to answer calls and quickly and easily connect customers to the appropriate company contacts, or provide important business information such as hours and directions.
Generally things are pretty simple if you are looking for a hosted service. Many of the major VoIP providers handle all the heavy lifting off-site, delivering calls to their phones and software clients without much hassle, especially if you use phones that are certified plug-and-play for the service in question. Most do not require additional hardware on site other than those phones; at most, you may need to find a space for a small hardware box somewhere on the site.
In contrast, maintaining a self-hosted, on-site VoIP system requires a bit more work. You need an IP-based private branch exchange, a VoIP-compatible version of the PBX phone systems used by many offices, to route your calls to the appropriate phones on your network, as well as a device called a PSTN gateway. The PSTN gateway sits between the IP-PBX software and the analog signals of the public switched telephone network, converting calls to and from digital signals as needed.
Regardless of which option you choose, you can typically handle the basic setup of your phone lines or extensions over the phone, while adjusting more advanced options requires diving into your provider’s online account interface.
What do you need to implement VoIP?
Depending on the size of your business and the infrastructure you already have, jumping on the VoIP bandwagon could cost your business next to nothing, or it could involve significant up-front costs.
Even home broadband connections can handle multiple VoIP calls simultaneously, but you will also need to make sure to leave the bandwidth available for other applications. If you work alone in a home office, or if you only have a few employees, you won’t have much to worry about; For example, in my setup, running RingCentral’s Connection Capacity utility shows that my 15mbps home Comcast connection could handle 11 calls simultaneously even if I had Netflix, Spotify, and an instant messaging client running on the network at the same time.
Make sure your internal network, including your routers and switches, can handle the load, too. Most providers suggest using a router with configurable Quality of Service settings and assigning high priority to VoIP traffic to maximize quality.
If your Internet Service Provider has a bandwidth limit, you should also take that into account. Most VoIP service providers use the high-quality G.711 codec for VoIP communications, which consumes 64 kb of data every second it speaks. In reality, even a large number of people should be able to chat over VoIP without having to worry about hitting bandwidth limits, but you’ll want to keep a close eye on your data usage to avoid exceeding that limit.
If you want to make VoIP calls, you will need a SIP-enabled phone, such as the Snom 300. Lastly, even if you subscribe to a cloud-hosted VoIP service, you will need to ensure that your phones can communicate via VoIP. Most VoIP systems use session initiation protocol technology to assign each phone or VoIP software client a specific address; this is how the IP-PBX routes calls to specific lines. As such, you will need a SIP-enabled phone to make VoIP calls. (Some VoIP systems use H.323 technology instead of SIP, but they are rare.) If you want to keep your old analog touch-tone phones or fax machines, you can connect them to an analog telephone adapter (ATA), but you won’t be able to use many of the advanced features that SIP-based VoIP phones offer.
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