Super Cheap Business Phone Service for the SMB

By: John Shepler

With the economy recovering at a snail’s pace, it’s still important to keep a sharp eye on all business expenses. This includes the monthly business telephone bill. Have you had this nagging feeling that you are paying a lot more for phone service than you could be? You are most likely right… and here’s why.

Most businesses start off by equipping their office or store with at least one traditional analog phone line that they get from the local telephone company. The smallest businesses get by with a single phone and its dedicated line. As they grow, the business may install a cordless phone system with two to four handsets all sharing that same line. Eventually, you may need to add a second line so two people can take or make calls without waiting.

SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) users may never get past this stage. You need an office full of staff to justify a PBX system or enterprise VoIP. You could be feeling left behind when you find out all the handy features these systems offer and how they can save money over just adding more and more analog phone lines to your location. Is there anything appropriate for small operators who just can’t justify the cost of these more sophisticated systems?

You bet there is. You can take advantage of the latest technology and cut the phone bill you have now by half or even more. How? By doing what the big guys do and move to a network voice solution.

Network voice? That’s another term for VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. VoIP can run on private networks or over the Internet, as the name implies.

The reason for the term network voice is that your phone calls, voice conversations, are converted to a protocol that will run on computer networks rather than the specialized telephone company lines. Why do this? Most every business now has broadband Internet service. You almost can’t do business without it these days. What you may not realize is that the broadband connection you already have can do double duty as a phone line as well.

This is where a lot of the savings comes from. Right now you pay for two lines. You pay one bill for your broadband line and second bill for your telephone line. Disconnect that telephone line and you save a chunk of change each month.

Sounds good, but if you get rid of your phone line what do you plug your business phone into? You can’t just plug it into your router. The connectors are completely different sizes.

What you need is an adaptor, also called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor. This is the electronics that converts telephone signals to Internet signals. You plug your phone into one jack and your cable or DSL modem into the other. There is an additional jack to plug your router into. Now everything is connected to the Internet and it all works just like before… except you are minus one outside phone line and that expensive monthly bill.

You still need a phone company, don’t you. Yes, but with VoIP you can choose a lower cost provider that gives you dozens of calling features that you are probably paying for a-la-carte right now. Choose wisely and you’ll get a provider that will give you that telephone adaptor box for free.

One of the premier companies in this field is Phone Power. They specialize in VoIP phone service for small and home offices and other small business users. You can use this as your home phone service as well if you office is in your home. That’s because a cloned second line is included with your service.

That adaptor box I was talking about, the ATA, comes with not one but two phone jacks from Phone Power. This allows you to have two simultaneous conversations on separate connections. You still have a single phone number but you can share that line and not interfere with each other’s conversations.

On top of the cloned second line, you’ll get a total of 45 features including 3 way conference calling, call hold, call waiting, call waiting Caller ID, call blocking, call return, call forwarding, do not disturb, voice mail, speed dial and a lot more. You even get an hour’s worth of international calling included each month so you don’t have to pay extra for international calls. Oh, both local and long distance calling to the US and Canada are also included, so there’s no need for a pricey extra long distance service.

How much does all of this cost? Would you be shocked to hear $8.33 a month? Sorry if just did a spit-take, but it’s true. The best plan, prepaid for a year with a second year’s service added free, comes out to a $8.33 monthly average. If you prefer to go month to month it’s $19.95 a month. That's probably much lower than your current bill.

Do a lot of International business or need to talk to friends and relatives around the world? The Phone Power Unlimited World Plus plan gives your unlimited calling to 75 countries and 26 mobile areas for just $24.95 a month plus taxes that you pay no matter what service you have.

Intrigued? You really should check out all the details on Phone Power phone services and compare with what you are paying for what you get now. You may well do what other small businesses have done and make the switch, pocketing the considerable cost difference.

SOHO VoIP Phone Service With Two Lines at $8.33/mo

Do you need business telephone service for your small office or home office and want it at bargain prices? Would you just like to get a great deal on home phone service with two lines so two people can make calls at the same time? Would you find a price of $8.33 a month attractive?

How is a deal like this even possible considering what the phone company dings you now for your landline service? The trick is to get your service from a competitive service provider with advanced technology and aggressive pricing. It’s too expensive for competitive telephone service providers to lease local phone lines anymore, so the answer is to use an alternative network to make the connection. This network happens to be the broadband service that you already have installed in your home or small business. Your broadband service can double as a phone line as well as a computer line.

This is the heart of VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. It’s also called broadband phone or network voice. You don’t have to buy a new telephone. You can use a regular landline phone for VoIP service by plugging it into an interface called an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA). Phone Power, one of the most advanced providers of VoIP phone service for home and small business users, includes an adapter with their VoIP service. What’s special about this one is that it lets you plug in two telephones instead of just one.

Here’s how this works. Plug two separate phones into the 2-line adapter. These can be single handset phone or those cordless phones with base stations and multiple handsets. Someone dials out on line 1 and makes their call. Meanwhile you want to make a call too. OK. Just pick up the second phone, get dial tone and make your call. You are both talking at once. You can also receive two separate phone calls. The only caveat is that you still have only one telephone number. The magic of technology has created a cloned second line.

Your service also includes lots of other desirable features. First, you get free calling to the US and Canada. There is no distinction between local and long distance calling. The one exception is international calls that have extra charges. Even so, you get an hour of free international calling every month. For most people, this is like having all the international long distance they really need.

Another 45+ free premium calling features are also included with your hosted VoIP service. These include the usuals like voicemail, Enhanced 911, 3 way conference calling, call forwarding, call waiting, call hold, incoming Caller ID with name, speed dial and the ability to keep your current telephone number.

Some of the more advanced features include voicemail-to-email viewer that lets you view and listen to your voice mails through your online account, a fax catcher that lets incoming faxes go to voice mail where they’ll be collected as a file you can open and print through your online portal, and an iPhone app. This free application, available on the iPhone App Store, lets you take your Phone Power VoIP phone service with you on the go. You’ll never miss an important call just because you are near the wrong phone.

So, how about this $8.33 per month pricing? It’s for real, but you need to buy a year’s phone service in advance. With that you get a second year’s service free, which averages out to $8.33 a month. Too much commitment? Get a 24 month term contract and pay $14.95 a month, $16.95 for a 12 month term, or go month to month for just $19.95 a month. Even this rate is probably lower than what you pay the phone company now or what some nationally advertised VoIP services dare to charge. It’s an amazing deal for an amazing suite of features.

Are you looking for new or better telephone service? If enterprise VoIP solutions are way more that you need or care to pay for, consider this feature rich VoIP phone service available at a bargain price.

Hosted VoIP Solutions Include New Phones

When we think of cloud services, it’s fairly easy to imagine the server racks down the hall being replaced by a much larger set somewhere out there. Similarly, it’s easy to see that the PBX in the telecom room disappears one day to be replaced by a much larger hosted PBX system in the cloud. But what about all those phone wires that used to plug into the PBX FSX and FSO ports? What do they plug into now?

They need to do what the network connections do. Moving data servers outside is made easier by connecting the LAN to an edge router that has a high capacity WAN line to your cloud service provider. When you outsource the PBX, the same thing needs to happen. In this case, the connection is called a SIP Trunk. Yes, it’s possible to terminate the SIP trunk into a myriad of analog phone ports so you can just plug in the phones you now have and keep going as if nothing has changed. But if you do that, you’ll miss out on one of the big advantages of upgrading to Hosted PBX service. That’s all the special features enterprise VoIP has to offer.

A big cost saver with VoIP, especially for medium and large organizations, is the consolidation of the separate phone and computer networks into one converged voice and data network. The phones are now like computer peripherals. There’s an RJ-45 jack on the back that connects to the network just like a PC. The phone has its own MAC address. You can move it around on the network and still have it ring at the same phone number. Forget rewiring or reprogramming like you have to do with standard phones when you make changes.

Analog phones can be made to work like IP phones by using an adaptor box called an ATA (Analog Telephone Adaptor). This is something of a kludge because the phone still has only the rudimentary features it had before. That’s why the ATA approach is only used for residential, home office and very small business situations. For every other application, the right thing to do is bite the bullet and move up to IP phones, also called SIP phones. These are telephones designed to run on the converged network and make use of productivity features you can get with networked telephony.

If you are designing your own in-house enterprise grade VoIP telephone system, you’ll need to budget for new phones as well as the IP PBX equipment. Count up the number of desks and wall phones, multiply by the cost of each IP Phone at several hundred dollars per, and your eyes may pop out at the total investment required. You can put together a capital investment plan and go face the bankers or take the alternative approach of pay-as-you-go.

Who let’s you pay by the month for your complete telephone service? Hosted PBX providers, that’s who. The pay for usage model is what’s making cloud computing such a hot service these days. There’s no reason telephony can’t be put on the same basis. The one variable is the telephone sets that remain at your business, not in the cloud. You can buy those, of course, or you can have the lease cost included in your per-seat pricing for the system. That way you get brand new sophisticated desk phones that are guaranteed to be compatible with the hosted phone service. You also have one provider to deal with for everything. If you’ve ever had to referee between phone set manufacturers and carriers blaming each other for something not working, you’ll recognize the advantage of having “one neck to wring.”

Would you like to avoid the never-ending capital appropriation and procurement cycle in favor of just paying for what you need as you need it? Hosted VoIP may be the way to go for your business. Get competitive quotes and features for hosted VoIP telephone systems and compare with the what you have now.

Do You Need A Special Phone For VoIP?

I’ve been getting inquiries from people who are wondering if you need to buy a special phone to use VoIP as a replacement for regular telephone service. So, do you?

Answer: It depends.

Here’s why. You have probably figured out that you can’t just take a regular telephone and plug it into your router or broadband modem. The connectors aren’t the same size. That’s good, because you might just cause some equipment damage by plugging these incompatible devices together. What you need is a special phone designed to work on a data network or an adaptor for the phone you have now.

Most VoIP services designed for residential and home business (SOHO) take the adaptor approach. A good example is PhonePower’s VoIP service. You can get residential and small business plans with unlimited calling to the U.S. and Canada for $14.95 a month. Your order the service online and they send you a free adaptor for your phone. In this case it’s the Grandstream HandyTone 502 ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor. You plug your phone in the phone jack that’s exactly the same size as the phone jack on your wall. You connect the ATA to your broadband modem or router using a standard Ethernet cable. Voila! You now have a regular telephone that works on VoIP.

But what’s going on in that ATA box to work the magic? There is circuitry that makes the phone connection look like it is coming right from your telephone company. That means generating the standard line voltage and ringing voltage that your phone is designed for. Those are analog signals because the phone is analog. The ATA also has to take care of converting between analog voice signals for the phone handset and digital packets for the Internet data network. This is done with CODECS or Coder/Decoders. In summary, the telephone needs to see its standardized analog signals and the Internet needs to see something that looks like a piece of computer equipment.

There’s a little more to it. Signaling for VOIP uses a standard called SIP or Session Initiation Protocol. SIP handles things like dialing and knowing when the phone is off-hook. SIP data is sent through the network just like other packets so it works just fine on the Internet or a private data network.

Because VoIP has become so popular for business, there are phones you can buy called SIP phones. These phones have the analog to digital circuitry of the ATA built-in. You can tell you have a SIP phone because it has a standard RJ-45 Ethernet jack on the back instead of the RJ-11 telephone jack. A SIP phone will connect directly to a LAN, a router or a broadband modem. It will need to be programmed for the VoIP service you are using. Some providers will give you instructions for how to do this. Others insist that you use their adaptor and an analog phone.

If you take your home phone into the corporate office, you may be shocked to find that there’s no place to plug it in. The company has installed an Enterprise VoIP system so that all desk phones plug into the corporate computer network. There is no separate phone network. All the phones are SIP phones. If for some reason you absolutely have to use your phone in that office, you’ll need to get an ATA and have it programmed to look like a SIP phone.

The bottom line is that regular telephones are analog. VoIP is digital. The way to make everything work is to use a phone that is matched to the network it is running on or use an adaptor to connect them.

Residential and Small Business VoIP Rates Crushed

VoIP telephony, sometimes called broadband phone service, has gone from a geeky computer app to full-fledged competition for mainstream telephone service in the course of a few years. The enablers for this have been the widespread replacement of dial-up Internet access with broadband services and the installation of Internet connections in small businesses. But just as ample rain leads to bumper crops, ample broadband has led to a bumper crop in VoIP providers. One of the most aggressive in this space, Phone Power, is now tweaking the industry by causing rates to plunge to less than $15 a month on unlimited residential and small home-based business service plans. That cost plummets even lower to just over $8 a month when you prepay for a year.

Granted, you can still pay even less for specialized services such as MagicJack and Skype. But both of these require you to use your computer as part of the phone system. When the computer is off, so is your phone. Plus you’ve got to deal with potential contention for processor resources when you try to use the phone while you are actually using the computer.

Phone Power and many other VoIP services that vie for your telephony dollar don’t work that way. They share your broadband connection in lieu of a traditional telephone line but don’t have any connection to the innards of your computer. Instead, they use a hardware device called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor to turn a phone jack into an Ethernet jack that connects into your router or broadband modem. Phone Power gives you the adaptor free while you are using their service. Some other vendors also do that or you can buy an adaptor at your local electronics outlet.

The cost of VoIP phone services seems to have settled into the $20 to $30 range for aggressive services that you see heavily advertised and somewhat more for some of the familiar name bundles. That’s not unreasonable, considering that VoIP has typically offered both unlimited local and long distance calling. A traditional landline plan is local service only with an additional per-minute charge for long distance calls. Additional features, such as Caller ID, are usually offered as ala-carte add-ons to your basic service.

The big telephone carriers also offer competitive bundles of local and long distance minutes or unlimited calling plans with popular features included. But at $14.95 a month? Try twice that. When you look at Phone Power’s 12 Month Prepay option, the difference is even more pronounced. This is a new customer promotional rate for $199.95 prepaid for a year’s service. But as part of this special promotion, Phone Power will include a 2nd year’s service for free. That brings your equivalent monthly rate down to about $8.33 for unlimited calling to US and Canada numbers and free lease of the telephone adaptor.

This offer is intended for residential addresses, including home office users and home-based businesses. If your business is large enough to have its own physical address, there are also business packages available for single and multi-line users, with a wealth of add-ons and upgrades to give you the power of a on-site PBX phone system without the capital expense.

If you are considering switching your residential or business phone service or are just feel you are paying too much for the service that you have now, you should take a look at Phone Power Residential and Business VoIP before you commit to buying any other service.

The Analog Telephone Adaptor Enables VoIP

The role of the ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor is to turn regular telephones into VoIP telephones. To perform this magic, the ATA has to fool the telephone set into thinking it is plugged into a standard telephone line. It also has to fool the broadband Internet connection into thinking it is plugged into a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) telephone compatible with the VoIP provider's service.

The electrical interface is perhaps the easiest to achieve. On the analog side, the phone plugs into a standard RJ-11 jack like you would find on a wall socket. This delivers the standard -48 V DC to power the handset along with the dial tone, AC ringing, and Caller ID signals when needed. It has to detect standard DTMF (Dual Tone Multi-Frequency) touch-tone waveforms from the keypad and convert them to digital format for IP signaling using Session Initiation Protocol, the standard for VoIP.

How does the analog voice become digital and back to analog again? That's the function of the Codec or Coder/Decoder. The standard in use since digital telephony was invented is G.711. But there are other codecs that must also supported. These may include G.723, G.729, G.728 and G.726.

On the network side, The ATA has to terminate a standard Ethernet connection, usually 10/100 Mbps through a RJ-45 connector labeled as WAN. Many newer ATAs take this a step further by including a second Ethernet port labeled LAN. This is for connection to a PC in lieu of connecting the PC directly to DSL, Cable Modem or T1 WAN. The ATA performs the function of an Ethernet switch or router. This is not just to save the cost of a separate device so that PC and telephone can share the same broadband connection. When a router is included in the ATA, it then has the ability to ensure quality of service by giving voice packets priority over computer data packets so that using the PC doesn't interrupt telephone calls.

Maintaining voice quality while minimizing bandwidth is also the function of signal processing within the ATA. Some common processes include line echo cancellation and dynamic jitter buffer that compensates for variations in Internet line speed. PLC or Packet Loss Concealment deals with missing or out of sequence packets. Either the packet is replaced with a zero packet, a copy of an already received packet, or an interpolation between the preceding and following packets. VAD or Voice Activity Detection senses when you are talking and stops generating packets while you are listening to reduce bandwidth needs. Because digital lines have no traditional analog "hiss", people sometimes equate silence with a lost connection. CNG or Comfort Noise Generation recreates that low level background noise to indicate that the connection between phones is still in place.

All of these functions have been integrated into a package you can hold in your hand, in the HandyTone 502 ATA that is provided at no cost when you order PhonePower VoIP telephone service for residential and small business use. You can use the analog phone you have now, including cordless phones with multiple handsets.

Other VoIP service providers have also gone the route of providing their customers with complimentary ATAs to make the transition from traditional analog to digital VoIP as easy as possible.

IP Phones Are In Demand

Enterprise VoIP is growing like crazy, but consumer adoption of IP phones is lagging far behind. That's the assessment of a recent study of the IP phone market. Is it that residential users aren't embracing new communication technology the way businesses are, or is there another explanation?

IP networks have been chipping away at the switched telephone network franchise for years. The reasons for this are both technical and financial.

For the consumer, the primary impetus has been to leverage their relatively expensive broadband (compared to dial-up) Internet service to also provide telephone services. There are many residential VoIP phone companies that offer bundled local and long distance service along with a dozen or two calling features all for one bundled price. For many consumers that price is lower that what you get ordering from the incumbent local telephone company.

There have also been a wealth of bundled CLECs or competitive local exchange carriers that competed with the incumbents, but changes in the telecom rules make leasing the telephone wires to your house too expensive for CLECs to offer an overall cost savings.

How do VoIP providers compete? They avoid the cost of leasing phone wires by using broadband services you already pay for. That can be either DSL or Cable, but the point is that most people buy broadband for their computers. VoIP uses the same connection as an alternative "phone wire" without additional cost. They also let consumers save money by reusing the phone they already have. You unplug your telephone set from the wall and plug it into an ATA or Analog Telephone Adapter box that is provided by the VoIP company, usually at no extra cost.

This is one reason that there is little to no demand for consumer IP phones. The residential marketplace isn't sophisticated enough yet to take advantage of services, like computer/telephone integration, or additional phone services, like videophone, that are practical with VoIP but not over traditional analog phone wires. Most consumers are still using corded handsets or cordless multi-telephone sets like the ones offered by Uniden.

The enterprise VoIP marketplace is quite different. Companies have various reasons for migrating to VoIP, but almost all are related to saving money directly or improving productivity to save money. While it is possible to get a better deal on local dial tone and long distance minutes using SIP Trunking instead of analog lines or T1 PRI digital phone lines, the real driver is the in-house phone system itself.

Traditional PBX telephone systems are large, proprietary and expensive to buy and maintain. They are rapidly giving way to IP PBX systems that are more like computer appliances than dedicated phone systems. IP telephony in-house offers the opportunity to converge the telephone and data networks into a single Ethernet connection to the desktop. Administrative and technical support can be considerably less for one network versus two, once the engineering has been accomplished to ensure quality of service for both voice and data users.

Like consumer VoIP, a business can acquire analog telephone adaptors and continue to use their existing handsets on the company LAN. But many additional features become available by switching to desk sets designed for IP services. The phone itself contains the network interface plus text display, video, and other features that make it as much a computer peripheral as a telephone. These phones are called IP phones or SIP phones. SIP is the switching technology used by VoIP telephone systems. There are many vendors of business IP phones, with Cisco being a major player.

Another point the report makes is that corded phones are the standard now, but will be replaced more and more by cordless and wireless handsets. That includes cell phones that are integrated into the corporate IP PBX systems, and perhaps wireless VoIP phones that will operate over the new LTE cellular broadband and WiMAX wireless networks that are just now starting to be deployed.

Try VoIP Phone Service For Under $10 a Month

Have you ever wished you could try one of the new VoIP telephone services to see if you'd like it better than your old landline? You've seen the ads. Sound pretty good, don't they. The bundled local and long distance service is on one bill. You get lots of features without getting nickle and dimed. International rates are just a few pennies a minute to many countries. You know what your bill is going to be and it's a lot less than you're paying now.

So why don't you just go ahead and make the switch? Well, you may not be all that sure if you're really going to like the service or if it will even work properly with your broadband connection. Perhaps you're just averse to signing long term contracts, especially when the vendor wants $40 or $50 a month for their phone service package. Isn't there a way to put a toe in the water and give VoIP a try without getting into the whole commitment thing?

You bet there is. What you are looking for is no contract VoIP service from Phone Power. There are plans for both business addresses and residential addresses. Please note that the under $10 promotional offer available when this article was first posted has expired. However, you can still get excellent plan pricing from Phone Power

These aren't stripped down calling plans, either. You get all the great features such as Caller ID, Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, 3-Way Conference Calling, Voicemail and Find Me Follow Me, among others. You may be paying extra fees each month to use these features on your current service. With PhonePower they are all included with your service package.

So, how do you hookup this VoIP service? The idea behind VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is that it uses your broadband Internet connection in place of traditional telephone wires to connect you to your phone service provider. Actually, you'll be sharing your broadband between your computer and your telephone. The way that's done is with an ATA or Analog Telephone Adapter, a box that converts your regular telephone into the digital format needed to connect to the Internet. PhonePower leases one of those boxes to you at no cost as long as you maintain your service.

Note that this type of VoIP Service does not require your computer to be on to receive or make phone calls. It doesn't hook into your computer at all, it just shares the Internet connection. As long as your broadband service is running, you'll have phone service.

One thing you do need is the right Internet connection. For VoIP that is DSL or Cable Broadband for most residential users. You can also use fiber optic Internet service if you happen to have that. In business offices you may have a T1 dedicated connection or higher speed service. All of these are suitable. Dial-Up access is too slow to work at all. Satellite Internet results in choppy and delayed conversations. Wireless Internet services may either prohibit VoIP service or have other limitations.

So, are you more interested in giving VoIP phone service a try? If your curiosity is piqued, then get all the details on features and terms of service and sign up if you wish for PhonePower VoIP digital telephone service.

You may also be interested in comparing a wide variety of VoIP service plans at Affordable VoIP.