What Every Business Needs to Know About Business VoIP and Unified Communications
An enterprise VoIP solution is an alternative to traditional switched voice service. Instead of using dedicated trunks between PBXs, you can share bandwidth with your data services, making better use of available capacity. Also, in today’s business world, the availability of a large number of unified communications functions within the VoIP ecosystem is a boon for business communications at all levels.
No matter which direction your business is headed with an enterprise VoIP solution … the key is understanding how you communicate and what you want to achieve.
Searching for a business VoIP solution, or more appropriately Voice Over Internet Protocol, can confuse any business. There are many types of VoIP … and many pros and cons … that you should consider when considering which service to choose. The goal of this article is to help you navigate through the technospeak so that you can make an informed decision that will save you time and money.
BUSINESS VOIP
The first thing to know about business VoIP service is that it can replace your local phone company. Whether you have just one POTS line (old phone service) … or one voice T1 (24 bundled dedicated lines) … an enterprise VoIP solution is bound to replace your phone company. Instead of using your local phone company’s voice connection, VoIP will digitize your voice signal and send it over an Internet connection.
In order for your voice to be transmitted digitally over the Internet, you must ensure that you have enough bandwidth to facilitate the communication link. To optimize the quality of your company’s connection, we recommend a minimum of one T1 line (preferably ethernet fiber depending on the size of your company), a dedicated link directly to the Internet that is guaranteed more than 99.999% of the time. Since you will entrust all your company’s voice communications to this technology, your Internet connection becomes the essential link. You don’t want to risk a business-wide phone outage to save a few hundred dollars on your bandwidth connection. So always opt for at least one T1 line (preferably ethernet fiber) over DSL. It just makes business sense.
If you need help finding and provisioning bandwidth … we have developed software that will allow you to generate a circuit price in just seconds. You can request a bandwidth quote (as well as quotes for business VoIP solutions) simply by asking at Business-VoIP-Solution.Com. Of course, the quotes are free and without obligation. NOTE: … all circuits purchased through this resource also include FREE independent circuit monitoring.
Once you’ve sorted out your high-speed internet connection, it’s time to select a business VoIP service provider, the company that will actually route your digitized voice signal to a real phone on the other end. In essence, your VoIP operator will become your long distance operator. The service providers we work with offer unlimited phone calls to the United States and Canada, all for a fixed price. For businesses that average more than $ 40 in local and long distance use per employee, the initial investment in VoIP is well worth it. In some cases, there are also very profitable options for international calls {just ask if interested}.
Likewise, there are other hidden benefits of the Business VoIP service, the main benefit being the reduction of the bandwidth necessary to maintain a regular telephone conversation. Since a VoIP transmission only requires 32 KB of bandwidth, you can fix up to 24 ‘VoIP lines’ on a data T1, and you still have 768 KB left for dedicated high-speed Internet access! This means that you can migrate your entire phone system to your existing T1 and still have half the bandwidth allotted for data.
Another benefit of VoIP lies in prioritizing the digitized voice signals that are generated when you speak. In case no one is speaking, the VoIP line does not transmit any data. This allows your T1 line to dynamically allocate bandwidth as needed, rather than permanently blocking an entire channel of data.
Business VOIP stands for smart communications. Whether it’s toll-free call routing, unified communications (embedded phone, email, instant messaging, etc.), or a dedicated app on the phone itself, the power of IPT is in the apps. In fact, the robust capabilities and functionality of the available unified communications applications are a real selling point in the adoption of Business VoIP.
In a highly mobile sales organization, “find me, follow me” functionality may be priceless. In an organization where deadlines must be met, point-and-click call control setup can be crucial. Other organizations can benefit from high-level call log metrics to track billable time. Enabling true mobility in your workforce, enhancing video / conferencing activity, and ease of use when traveling around the world are also very attractive attributes for businesses.
With so many functions available on most platforms … you rarely see all users applying the same controls and functions. It’s the freedom to control communication at the single user level that makes VoIP a great business solution. Additionally, the marriage of Business VoIP technology and Unified Communications capabilities opens up a world of limitless possibilities and applications for today’s business communications.