There’s another stampede building right now. It’s the opportunity to move from the in-house phone system with trunk lines to the local telco to cloud hosted telephone services. In a way, what’s happening to local business telephone service is what happened to long distance decades ago. It’s moving to a lower cost model via disruptive technology. What will turn it into a full blown stampede is providers who make the move painless for their customers. Think about it. If you can cut your total phone costs in half without having to go through a gauntlet of technical gymnastics yourself, how can you not make the move?Megapath, a full-service competitive telecom provider, is doing its best to become your next telephone company as well as your network services vendor. They’re doing this with a comprehensive hosted voice platform that makes it easy to get the phone services you need without YOU having to make the investment, develop the expertise or provide the staffing.
Just what is hosted voice and how can it offer such dramatic cost savings? It’s a matter of economy of scale. Every business can go out and buy a PBX switching system and a truck full of phones, wire all this up and bring in local dial tone with a bunch of POTS lines or an ISDN PRI trunk. Isn’t this pretty much what everyone has done? The alternative is to have a specialized service provider build a much larger switching system and the staff to run it and have companies who are not in the telephone business get their services remotely.
Hosted voice is a lot like website hosting in that instead of you maintaining your own servers, you pay by the month for someone else to provide the servers and the bandwidth that connects them to the internet. With hosted voice, you pay by the month for MegaPath or another hosted voice provider to switch all your in-house, local and long distance phone conversations and provide the telephone trunks that connect to the public phone system.
WIth hosted voice, there is no need to buy or maintain a local PBX phone system. You don’t need to lease any telephone lines. Whatever PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) connections you need will be provided. All you need are IP phones connected to your network and a voice gateway that that manages bandwidth to your service provider to ensure that voice quality has priority over other traffic. Capital investments are a thing of the past. You buy phones as you need them and you might even get the phones included free with your service plan.
It might not be immediately obvious that hosted voice with pay-as-you-go pricing has a flexibility that in-house systems lack. There is no need to buy more capacity than you can use right now. If you need 25 phones, then 25 phones and the service to run them is all you order. If you land a new contract and have to start hiring like crazy, then you go ahead and add “seats” to your system as needed. You pay incrementally more each month to match the increase in your business. You don’t go out and buy a big switching system to handle anticipated needs. The hosted voice provider has a system that can accommodate any possible number of phones you’ll ever order. That reserve capacity is something that works to your benefit but you don’t have to pay for.
The days of every company being in the telephone business are about over. The rise of hosted voice systems connected by SIP trunks, basically high bandwidth dedicated lines, enables a new model of telephony where you simply pay for what you need when you need it. Could this approach offer advantages for your company? Get competitive quotes for Hosted Voice Enterprise VoIP Telephony and compare them to your current costs, including what you have to invest in equipment and maintenance. It may be time for you to make the move to a hosted phone system.
