Member Article

Is VoIP right for my Business? - Part 1

VoIP. That mysterious term that many businesses still don’t quite understand. The hype makes it sound more flexible, more full-featured and, best of all, significantly cheaper than placing your calls through traditional telephone service providers.

But is VoIP really all it’s cracked up to be? Are the potential pitfalls worth the potential monetary payoffs? Over the next week, I will walk you through the basics of VoIP, discuss the positives and negatives, and investigate some commercial VoIP services of varying complexity.

How Does VoIP Work?

If you’re looking for an off-site hosted service, things are generally pretty simple. For example, Agile Group would manage the bulk of the work remotely. Delivering calls to your phones and software clients comes without hassle, especially if you use phones that are plug-and-play certified for the service in question. Aside from the phones, the majority of VoIP solutions do not require additional on-site hardware aside. You may need to locate a space for a small box of hardware at some point down the line, but nothing more.

By contrast, maintaining a self-hosted on-site VoIP system requires a more work. To start with, you would need an IP-based phone system, to deliver 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 phone system software and the analog signals of the public switched telephone network, converting calls to and from digital signals as necessary.

Regardless of if your business went with an on or off-site solution, typically you can handle the basic settings for your phone lines or extensions over the phone, whilst having more advanced settings and configurations requires exploring a software interface.

What Do You Need to Implement VoIP?

One of the key aspects businesses need to consider with VoIP is cost implications. Depending on the size of your company and the infrastructure you already have in place, jumping on the VoIP bandwagon could cost your company next to nothing, or it could create significant initial costs.

VoIP requires a broadband connection and the more simultaneous users you have, the more bandwidth you’ll need. If you work alone or out of a home office, or if you have only a few employees, you won’t have much to worry about. For example, a business with 3 users on a 24MB internet connection could handle half a dozen call simultaneously even if they had Netflix, Spotify and some form of instant messaging running on the network at the same time. By contract, expand that businesses to 15 users on the same connection with the same applications running and you would do well to 1 or 2 functional phone calls.

It is important to ensure that your internal network, including your routers and switches, can handle the load, too. We would suggest using a router with configurable Quality of Service settings and assigning VoIP traffic high priority to maximize the quality.

If your Internet connection has a bandwidth limit in place then you should take that into consideration as well. We’re going to get a little technical here, but most VoIP service providers use the high-quality G.711 codec for VoIP solutions, which consumes 64kb of data every second you talk. In reality, even a large number of people should be able to talk using VoIP without having to worry about hitting bandwidth caps, but you’ll want to keep close tabs on your data usage to avoid exceeding that limit.

Finally, even if you subscribe to a cloud-based hosted VoIP service, you’ll need to make sure your phones can communicate over VoIP. Most VoIP systems use session-initiation protocol technology to assign each phone or VoIP software client a specific address. As a result, users will need a SIP-enabled phone to make VoIP calls. Retaining an existing analog touch-tone phones or fax machines is possible as you can plug them into an analog telephone adapter (ATA). However they won’t be able to use many of the advanced features that SIP-based VoIP phones provide.

On Monday, we’ll highlight some of the positive and negatives of using a VoIP solution. If there are any questions in the meantime about VoIP for your business, contact Agile Group today on 0871 700 2228.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Agile Group .