Advantages of VoIP Phone Systems

One of the advantages of VoIP (Voice over IP) phone systems is they that differ from a  traditional phone system in the way that they work, the costs involved and the flexibility of the system. The key things that you can do with a phone system, make phone calls, transfer calls, answer the phone etc. are exactly the same on VoIP systems as they are on traditional analogue phone systems. In most cases will will not be able to tell that the phone you are using is a VoIP phone, they look the same as any other phone and the call quality is at least as good.

Traditionally a business would have a Phone Exchange, sometimes called a PBX, and a number of phone lines. The phone lines would either be traditional Analogue lines, for a very small business, and either ISDN2 or ISDN30 for companies which need multiple phone lines. The PBX allows you to make internal calls, between people in the same office, and also to make and receive external calls. i.e. calls to your customers.

A VoIP phone system still uses a PBX, however this can either be in an in-house system, like a Cisco CallManager or an appliance like an Asterix system. The other way is to use a hosted, or cloud based, phone exchange. Using a hosted phone exchange allows small businesses to benefit from the features and facilities of enterprise grade phone systems, without having the capital expense of having to buy an exchange.  A VoIP phone system runs over the Internet, typically over a dedicated ADSL line in a Small Business.

Advantages of VoIP Phone Systems

The advantages of VoIP phone systems, particularly Hosted VoIP phone systems, include:-

• High Quality calls at low cost
• Infinitely expandable as your business grows
• You never need to change or loose your phone number, even when you move offices
• You don’t have the capital expense of buying a PBX, this can save you hundreds or thousands of Pounds
• Simple to move offices, just pick up your phones and plug them into your new office network. No need to reconfigure anything or spend hours on the phone to BT
• You don’t have to decide how many external lines you are going to need
• Its really simple to include home workers in the office phone system, all they need is a broadband line. Now when they are working from home they could be sat at the next desk. You can see if they are on the phone, through the presence indicator, transfer calls to them (for free) and they can make calls that have the office number as the outgoing call line identification (CLI)
• Calls between multiple office and home workers are free
• If you travel – use a soft-phone on your laptop, or mobile phone, and all your calls appear to come from the office
• If you are working outside the UK, calls to the office remain free from your soft-phone, and calls to other UK numbers are just local calls that get charged to the office
• Never miss a call again
• Access your Voicemail from anywhere that has Internet access or get it sent to you as an email
• Click to dial – highlight phone numbers on a web page and call them directly
• Outlook Integration – quickly and simply dial your Outlook contacts
• Calls between other businesses using the same provider are, with most systems, free of charge. You only get charged when you go ‘off net’
• You can have calls ‘overflow’ between offices, where if one office is really busy their calls can be answered by one of the less busy offices.
• You can even have multiple numbers for the same office. i.e. An office in Cornwall having both a Penzance number and a London number.
• If you can’t get into the office, due to adverse weather conditions; or if the office suffers from a power cut you can receive you calls at home. Either through a ‘soft phone’ or an IP phone at home.

Limitations of the traditional Phone System

A traditional phone system has its own PBX and a number of phone lines.

• If you have a single ISDN2 line this allows you to have a total of 2 external calls running concurrently, after that any other customers calling in would receive an engaged tone.
• You have to estimate how many simultaneous, external, calls that will be taking place. This is quite difficult as you may be able to estimate the number of outgoing calls, but its more complex to estimate the number of incoming calls. If you get it wrong it can be expensive, either you are paying for lines that you don’t really need, or you are loosing business because customers get an engaged tone when they call.
• When you want to add more external lines you may also need to upgrade the PBX to cope with the additional lines.
• It is difficult to include home workers into the phone system.
• If you have multiple offices, calls between the offices can get expensive.
• Quick and easy to put a ‘Call Me Now’ button on your website, that costs the customer nothing, as a quick and easy way to help convert hot prospects.

Using the advantages of VoIP day to day

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to test the advantages of VoIP for your business. If you choose the right system you will quickly appreciate the advantages of VoIP for a small and growing business.

Advantages of VoIP – New Start-up

If you are starting a new business venture from home you need to project the right image from day one, so rather than using your home phone number or just using a mobile number get a VoIP phone system. Most homes have broadband already so all you need is a VoIP phone and a connection from a VoIP provider, like ourselves.

Starting at only £8.00 a month for business grade VoIP its a very cost effective route into ‘big business’ telephony.

Advantages of VoIP – Unified Communications

You can integrate your mobile phone into your VoIP network, so if you are near a Wi-Fi connection you can recieve and make calls as part of the office phone system. So getting hold of people is even simpler and can be free, rather than paying mobile phone charges.

Unified Voice-Mail

• Get your mobile phone voicemail and your office voicemail delivered into a single, unified, mailbox.
• Review and play your voicemail from a web-page

Web Control

• View your missed calls, phone contacts, voicemail etc all from a single web-page
• Redirect calls and setup ‘hunt groups’ from a simple web UI
• Call Me Now – button on your website

Advantages of VoIP – Growing Business

As your business grows and you either take on people working from home, or get an office you can expand your VoIP phone system. If you are moving into an office you will appreciate the advantages of VoIP when all you need to do is provision Broadband in the office and plug the phones in – your calls will now appear in the office.

When you need to add more people to the business its almost as simple as plugging in an additional phone. You will never outgrow a Hosted VoIP solution.

Advantages of VoIP – Cost Control

• If you have multiple locations, either branch office or home workers, then all of the calls between your locations are free.
• All calls appear on the main office bill, so no more having to apportion parts of home phone bills.
• If your customers or suppliers use the same VoIP provider calls to them are free as well.
• There are no sudden step costs, like having to upgrade the office PBX once you get past 50 users.

Advantages of VoIP – Flexibility and Mobility

• If you need to work away from the office you can simply use a softphone on your desktop computer. Provided that you have internet access then you can use the phone system as though you are in the office. So you could be in:-
  • A hotel room
  • Working abroad
  • Sat in Starbucks
• Quickly ‘spin up’ a branch office when you need to. Either as part of a new Business Venture or as a ‘Project Office’ on a customer site as part of a larger piece of business.

Can I Run VoIP?

To check if your network is suitable for running VoIP you should run a set of network tests. Follow the links to Speed Tests and Ping Tests in other posts on Computer Spot in order to find out if your network is suitable for VoIP.

These two tests will check if your broadband has the capacity to run VoIP and will also check the Internet Quality Test of your Broadband. The Ping Test, or Internet Quality Test, is the really important test if you are considering running a VoIP phone system.

There is no point in using VoIP if it sounds like a bad mobile phone connection. There are a lot of VoIP providers out there and not all of them offer Business Grade VoIP. So make sure that you select a provider who offer Business Grade VoIP, with all of the features and advantage of a large business PBX. Then your business will experience the advantages of VoIP.

You should now understand some of the advantages of VoIP for your business

Where Can I get a VoIP Phone System?

As part of the SystemAssure solution we offer a hosted VoIP Phone System. You can find out more about the advantages of VoIP for your business on the SystemAssure VoIP pages. The hosted VoIP phone solution we offer is Business Grade and is cost effective for single users through to companies with hundreds of users. So call us today to find out more about the advantages of VoIP for your business.

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