Enterprise VoIP Moves to the Cloud

by: John Shepler

Enterprise VoIP has been replacing switched circuit analog telephone business systems for decades. PBX systems transformed into IP PBX, but they were still premises based hardware and software. Now those telecom rooms are emptying as business VoIP moves to the cloud and transforms into Unified Communications.

What’s Cloud Got To Do With It?
Businesses started installing their own phone switching equipment when half a dozen buttons on a desk phone weren’t enough anymore. PBX actually stands for Private Branch Exchange. It mimics the phone company central office but sized just for your company. Even so, that can mean hundreds or thousands of people and phones. PBX systems that can handle this amount of traffic often require their own dedicated staff.

The impetus to move to the cloud centers around clearing out all that equipment and the staff to keep it updated and running smoothly. However, it’s not magic. The common joke about the cloud is that there really is no cloud, it’s just somebody else’s computer. That’s about it. Only cloud providers have huge facilities with huge staffs for economy of scale. You not only get away from the hassle of running a phone system, you can likely save money in the process.

New Capability and No Investment Required
One problem with in-house technology is that it’s easy to outgrow and it goes obsolete really fast. You avoid both issues with cloud services. A decent size cloud can handle as much expansion as you can think of. Software updates are routinely handled by the provider. Most PBX functions are now in software anyway. That means that adding or changing features doesn’t require junking racks full of perfectly good equipment. It’s a simple download to what is likely a virtual server.

Telephone calls are getting to be just one of many functions that companies want in their “phone” system. The old standard desk phone has to easily integrate with mobile smartphones where a lot of the conversations are taking place. Then there is text messaging, email and video conferencing. This is how business people communicate these days. The voice call is just one option. With IP telephony, the concept of voice as an application has been realized. What’s more, you may want to have multiple types of communication going on at the same time. That’s Unified Communications and cloud providers offer it under the name Unified Communications as a Service or UCaaS.

Special Needs of Call Centers
Many businesses find it advantageous to have their own in-house call center rather than outsourcing that function. With managed cloud services this is easily realized. You can add features such as an automated receptionist, call recording, automatic call distribution, interactive voice responses, call queues, skills-based routing, dedicated phone numbers, integration with CRM systems and reporting & metrics.

The beauty of cloud based call centers is that they don’t much care where the employees are located. None of your people will be sitting in the cloud data center anyway. This means that you can easily add remote workers and contractors to your team. They just let the system know when they are available and they’ll start getting assignments until they indicate they are unavailable.

What It Takes to Connect To the Cloud
You need to take special care in connecting your business and your people to the cloud if you want top notch performance. The Internet can be a bit dicey at the worst possible time, so you want the best connections possible. From your home office and remote offices, if possible, dedicated lines or SIP Trunks are best. Just avoid the Internet all together. Home workers may not even have that option or it can be too expensive for one worker locations, so the most reliable high speed broadband available is highly desirable. New SDN or Software Defined Networks make it easy to combine several broadband connection to make one faster and more reliable Internet connection. That can be the difference between distorted and interrupted calls and smooth seamless connections.

Are you getting frustrated with an under-performing phone system or feel you are missing out on productivity by not having the latest UCaaS features? You have many options available and complementary expert consulting to help you pick the most appropriate for your organization. Find out what Enterprise VoIP, Call Center and UCaaS services are available to you now, quickly and easily.

ShoreTel Connect CLOUD Goes Way Beyond VoIP

By: John Shepler

VoIP phone systems are often seen as a one for one replacement for traditional analog business phones combined with Key Telephone and PBX systems. Reasons to make the switch to newer technology include removing the need for separate telephone and computer networks and the option to outsource the in-house switching system to the cloud. In fact, switching to IP phones opens the door to a much richer set of features, now commonly referred to as Unified Communications (UC).

ShorTel has been a leader in enterprise communications. ShorTel phones are common in companies large and small. ShorTel is also a leader in UC, with its ShorTel Connect CLOUD service. Here is a brief overview:


It’s important to emphasize that ShorTel Connect CLOUD is a fully hosted and managed communications solution that takes the monkey of telephone system management off your back, while adding new capabilities. These include Instant Messaging, video, desktop sharing, and conference calling.

In addition, you can integrate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications such as Salesforce and NetSuite to improve employee productivity. Automation is a key ability that’s offered by Unified Communications and presents a strong argument for upgrading from traditional telephony-only analog and VoIP systems.

Cloud-based UC offers some other efficiency advantages. First, you trade capital expenditures for pay-as-you-go monthly billing on a per-seat basis. At first glance, this might seem like six of one / half dozen of another. That is, until the need to scale up or down appears. Add more employees? Just add more seats to your existing system. No need to go out and make a major capital investment in a new PBX mainframe. Business in a downturn? Just reduce the amount of resources to match your resized organization.

These are the same arguments used for cloud computing, and for a good reason. Conceptually, the cloud works the same regardless of what application is hosted. Is voice just another app on cloud? Yes, with the caveat that real time streams such as audio and video require special prioritization to ensure quality of service.

Reliability and security are other major concerns with cloud-based systems. ShorTel offers enterprise-grade performance backed by strong Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Easy access to customer service is also provided as a managed system.

Are you feeling limited by your business telephone system and concerned that you are missing out on the productivity enhancements and cost savings offered by cloud-hosted Unified Communications systems? Find out what ShoreTel Connected CLOUD can offer you.

Cyber Monday is For Business Buyers Too

By: John Shepler

Cyber Monday is the new tradition for shopping online to get deals that you couldn’t in the rough and tumble of brick and mortar Black Friday sales. You’ll see numerous offers for special deals targeted at consumers today. But what about businesses? Is there such a thing as Cyber Monday for business?

There should be. Business purchases are a huge part of the economy. What’s more, what businesses have to pay for products and services reflects in the price consumers have to pay. If your business can get a bargain on Cyber Monday, it’s a win all the way around.

Let’s have a look at some things that you might not think are ripe for savings, yet actually are. While prices for these services might not be specific to this particular day, there’s still a huge incentive for you to take a closer look. You’ll likely find savings that you didn’t know were available. Whatever you save will pay off for months and years into the future.

1. T1 Lines
Just about every company has leased a T1 line at some point in its growth. Many still do, and new T1 lines are being provisioned every day. Why has this decades old telecom service retained its popularity in the face of technological advancement?

It’s hard to beat a winner. T1 lines have a long history of reliability and versatility. You can use a T1 line as a point to point private line, dedicated Internet access, MPLS network connection, or as a T1 or ISDN PRI telephone trunk for your telephone system. They offer the same bandwidth in both directions and are inherently low in latency.

What T1 lines have that many other telecom services don’t have is near universal availability. They come in on ordinary twisted pair telephone cable that is available to just about every business building. The one gripe has been cost. Ten years ago, T1 lines were pricey. You had to swallow hard and sign the contract if you needed connectivity. Today, prices are a fraction of what they used to be and are attractive to even very small businesses.

If you are unhappy with “consumer grade” broadband or have a T1 contract that is a few years old or more, you should get an instant price quote for T1 line services now.

2. Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper, also called EoC, is the direct competitor to T1 lines. EoC is a newer technology and uses the same twisted pair copper wires that provision T1. It’s also symmetrical in bandwidth, highly reliable and low in latency, jitter and packet loss.

What Ethernet over Copper offers is higher bandwidth and… Ethernet! While your phone system may still be a traditional Key Telephone System or PBX using analog POTS lines or ISDN PRI, your computer network is almost certainly based on Ethernet. EoC lets you connect to other locations or the Internet while keeping your packets in the Ethernet protocol all the way. This opens the door to services like E-LAN that let you set up a bridged LAN that includes locations across town or nationwide.

Unlike T1 that has a fixed bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps no matter the distance, EoC technology trades off speed for distance. If you are close to the central office you can get very high speeds, perhaps 50 Mbps or more. Farther away, available line speed drops off as the line length increases. Even so, most business locations can get 3 Mbps up to 10 or 20 Mbps using Ethernet over Copper. Even better, the cost per Mbps is usually lower than what you pay for T1… perhaps half as much.

If you are running out of bandwidth on your T1 line or want to see if you can get the same or higher bandwidth at a better price, you’ll want to check out Ethernet over Copper bandwidth speeds and prices for your locations.

3. Metro Ethernet over Fiber
If Ethernet over Copper is a good idea, Ethernet over Fiber is a even better one. Fiber optic networks have multiplied in recent years, with tentacles reaching into nearly every city around the globe. The other revolution is the rise of independent private carriers to compete with the traditional telephone companies. This competitive environment has expanded service availability and reduced prices.

If you’ve had fiber optic services for years, chances are that you have one of the legacy SONET telco fiber lines. These include OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps and OC48 at 2.4 Mbps. SONET is highly reliable and low in latency, jitter and packet loss. It traditionally has suffered from lack of availability, few fixed bandwidth levels, and high prices per Mbps compared to what is available now.

Yes, SONET is still a good fiber service to have. Prices have come down dramatically over the years. But Ethernet over Fiber is an even better deal. Like EoC, EoF keeps your traffic in the Ethernet protocol for easy interfacing, and the ability to get LAN-type connectivity among multiple locations.

it’s also highly scalable. You can get just about any bandwidth level you want between 10 Mbps and 10 Gbps. In some major business centers, speeds as high as 100 Gbps are available to businesses as well as carriers. What’s more, you can generally get your service upgraded quickly with just a phone call to your provider. Quickly means anything from a few hours to a week or so. Compare that with weeks or months if you need a SONET upgrade.

If you need bandwidth of 10 Mbps or higher for your business (not residential) location, it is well worth your while to take a few minutes this Cyber Monday (or any other day) and check out the fiber optic bandwidth and pricing options available right now.

4. Hosted PBX
Everybody knows what a business telephone is. It’s that box with a handset and dial pad that sits on your desk and has its own wiring to the phone company or an in-house phone system. Business phones are essential for business. The traditional phone systems aren’t so essential anymore. In fact, you are likely missing out on both features and cost savings if you aren’t looking at the new cloud hosted VoIP or cloud PBX phone services. So, let’s take a Cyber Monday shopping trip.

There are numerous companies offering “hosted” phone services. These range of single line VoIP telephone services all the way up to call centers in the cloud. They’re all based on the idea that if telephones can connect to the computer network, then the switching equipment can be located anywhere. Today, the best deals are cloud service providers who operate massive data centers dedicated to IP telephony.

Don’t confuse enterprise VoIP services with the low-end Internet VoIP services. They may use similar technology, but the trick to consistently high voice quality is a dedicated network connection between you and the provider. This is known as a SIP trunk. The bandwidth of the trunk determines how many simultaneous calls it will support. You can have a few lines or thousands. Only the speed of the connection changes.

What Hosted PBX does is change the way you pay for your phone service. Instead of making a major capital investment in equipment and ongoing maintenance expenses, you pay per phone per month to a service firm. That firm bears the cost and responsibility of running a highly reliable and easily scalable phone system for your company. All you have in-house are the IP phones plugged into your computer network and a specialized router to prioritize the voice traffic.

Is your phone system too small or getting a little “creaky”? Before you go out and drop a bundle on a shiny new in-house equipment rack, see how competitive and feature-filled a Cloud Hosted PBX service can be.

Now you see how Cyber Monday can be as asset to businesses beyond what you sell to consumers on this single day of the year. Use Cyber Monday as an incentive to shop for your business as well as yourself and get deals that will pay off handsomely for years.

Why Such a Stampede to The Cloud?

You can hardly turn around these days without hearing something about “the cloud.” Is it true that there is a mass migration under way from local data centers to cloud service companies? For those who make the move, why are they doing it and what do they hope to achieve?

The Cloud You Don’t Know
Cloud storage is the big app that’s getting all the press, but unlimited server capacity is also a strong draw. One application that you may not be thinking of is Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. This is a replacement for your in-house telephone system. Yes, you still have phones, but they plug into your data network rather than their own telephone wiring. There is no switching system in-house. That’s in the cloud.

Why Hosted PBX?
You get rid of all the headaches associated with buying and maintaining the in-house system, including all of those moves, adds and changes. Plus, you pay only for what you need. Add phones as you need them and pay by the month for each one in service. Don’t need them anymore due to downsizing or change of business direction? Get rid of ‘em. Some providers will even give you the phones so you don’t have to buy them yourself. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

How can the cloud help your business?
Get the latest on competitive cloud services available for your business operations.

Telephone Trunks for Call Centers

By: John Shepler

All businesses need telephone lines of some sort. Independent professionals may rely on a smartphone for wireless communication, but businesses with offices or stores open to the public or with two or more employees almost always have some sort of landline installed. Let’s take a look at the analog and digital options available and the advantage of installing telephone trunk lines to increase capacity and reduce cost.


Plain Old Analog
Analog phone lines are the legacy technology of the phone companies going back over a century. You’ll hear them described as POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service. POTS lines are well established, highly reliable and engineered for high voice quality on both local and toll calls. Standard phones, including desk sets and cordless phones with multiple handsets, are analog phones and plug directly into analog business phone lines.

Broadband Phone
The digital solution for a single phone line is a broadband Internet connection shared with the computers. This option is usually chosen for its low cost, but voice quality can degrade and certain applications, like FAX machines and alarm systems, may not function correctly.

Adding More Lines
What about the vast majority of businesses with more than one phone line, especially those with an in-house contact center or specializing as a call center? Small operations sill rely on analog phone lines. You can add analog lines one at a time and plug them into your key telephone system or PBX switching system. Each outside line has its own phone number.

How Costs Add Up
Adding analog phone lines incrementally as you need them works well until you get more than half a dozen to a dozen separate lines. There are no technical issues, but costs mount up. Two lines cost twice as much as one line. Six lines cost six times as much. There is no economy of scale as these are independent lines.

How Trunking Saves
The strategy for reducing costs while maintaining voice quality and reliability is called trunking. Trunking simply means combining multiple lines to create a single trunk line with the same capacity. Trunking was invented by the telephone industry to transport dozens or even thousands of phone conversations efficiently from switching office to switching office. Originally, this was done with analog technology called carrier telephony. In recent decades, it’s all gone digital from office to office, leaving analog POTS lines only for that last mile connection between the telco office and the customer’s premises.

T1 Telephone Trunks
The first digital trunk line that was introduced by the phone industry for business users was the T1 telephone line. Yes, this is the same T1 technology that you may be using for point to point or dedicated Internet access. The difference is that the T1 line is divided or “channelized” into 24 separate segments or time slots. Each channel can transport one two-way telephone conversation and is the equivalent of an analog POTS line. You can use an appliance called a channel bank to convert between analog phone and the T1 line. Most in-house PBX phone systems have the necessary interface to do this or it can be added easily with a plug-in card.

Cost Advantage of T1
The big advantage of T1 trunks is that they become cost competitive with multiple POTS lines when you get over 6 to 10 outside lines. If you need more than a dozen phone lines for your desks or a call center operation, T1 is the lower cost option. Multiple T1 lines can be added to provide blocks of 24 outside lines incrementally.

ISDN PRI Improves on T1
A newer version of the T1 line is called ISDN PRI or Primary Rate interface. It uses the same T1 line but reserves one channel for signaling and switching. The other 23 channels are available as separate phone lines. ISDN PRI is popular with call centers because it provides faster call setup and teardown than the older T1 telephone lines. It also offers digital data ,such as Caller ID, that is not generally available on just T1 trunks. Like T1, though, multiple ISDN PRI trunks can be installed to provide as many outside lines as needed. Cost is competitive with T1 and most PBX systems come with the PRI interface already installed.

SIP Trunking, The Emerging Standard
While ISDN PRI is now the standard in commercial telephone trunking technology, an even newer technology is available to better support enterprise VoIP telephone systems. This is called SIP trunking. SIP is the switching protocol used by IP telephones and VoIP phone systems.

SIP vs T1
SIP trunks are also digital, but differ from T1 lines in that they are based on packet switching rather than time division channelization. Packet switching is the heart of all Ethernet networks that support computing. What companies are doing is replacing their old analog telephones with IP phones that connect to the same network as the computers. SIP trunks extend this connection out to the service provider for multiple telephone lines or a combination of voice and data.

Private Lines vs The Internet
Note that high performance SIP trunks are private lines between the user and the carrier and do not suffer from the vagaries of Internet broadband phone. SIP trunks often have the ability to also supply Internet service, but the telephone packets have priority to maintain high voice quality. SIP trunking is becoming popular for call center operations as companies replace their old PBX systems with newer IP PBX systems or choose to outsource the switching function to the cloud.

How to Choose
Which type of telephone trunking arrangement is optimum for your organization? Get some expert advice on the tradeoffs and competitive pricing from multiple carriers serving your location. Call now toll free (888) 848-8749 or enter your inquiry at Telexplainer.net

Achieving Call Quality Momentum With Cloud Communications

By: John Shepler

Are you frustrated with your decades old in-house phone system that is getting more obsolete by the minute? Or, do you have a horror story that revolves around moving to VoIP only to find the reliability bad and the call quality worse? It’s time you gained some momentum with a superior cloud communications solution… like one from Momentum. Have a look….


If you are new to IP based voice communication, you may not be aware of the pitfalls that can ruin a good network voice system or the solutions that are just bad to begin with. This is where you need a “best of breed” vendor to ensure your success.

There are a couple of competing approaches to enterprise level VoIP. The first is to have the system located and operated in-house. You treat it as part of the IT infrastructure. That’s different from traditional approaches that have kept the telephone network and IT network forever separate.

Some companies only go so far as to replace their T1 telephone lines or ISDN PRI trunks with SIP trunks in order to get a better deal from a competitive service provider. Nothing changes in-house other than a new way to connecting to the phone company.

While this is the least amount of upset to the status quo, it does nothing to modernize your phone system. You gain none of the advanced calling features that VoIP systems have to offer. For that, you need to combine voice and data.

Enterprise VoIP, as opposed to a home office or small office with one or two phones, involves making the IT network also your phone network. You can add adaptors to your current analog phones so they connect to Ethernet, but you’re probably better off upgrading to IP telephones that have the network interface built-in plus all sorts of other capabilities.

Once you get all the phones on your LAN and off the phone wiring, you reach another fork in the road. Do you buy an in-house IP PBX system and continue to run everything yourself, or do you offload the switching system and connections to the public phone system to a cloud vendor?

Cloud communication is becoming a very attractive option. You avoid the capital investment of upgrading your in-house system and the ongoing maintenance costs. You also gain the ability to include remote workers in the system so you can communicate the same way no matter where you happen to be. Being tied to a desk, especially by a phone cord, can damage both your flexibility and productivity.

Momentum, the service provider, has some very attractive pluses in cloud communications. For one thing, they offer measurable call quality. Getting network voice right can be a tricky prospect and your customers will know if your phone system degrades. You also gain mobility, cloud disaster recovery and call center features. Best of all, you may find that your next phone system upgrade can save rather than cost you money.

Is your business ready to tap the advantages of cloud hosted communications? If so, find out what Momentum and other top tier providers have to offer. You may be surprised at what you can get for the same or less than you spend now.

Contact Center On Demand in the Cloud

Cloud communications services are becoming more sophisticated by the day. It’s a natural extension of the cloud computing revolution. Having successfully moved the data servers to the cloud, many companies have eyed the telecom room and wondered why they still need to support that large, expensive and soon to run out of capacity PBX telephone system.

More and more, it makes sense to move business phone operations to the cloud. It all started with Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX and has expanded from there. The idea behind hosted PBX is that the telephone switching function can be accomplished just as easily from a cloud data center as it can from a back room in your office. The “big iron” hardware goes away, as do the analog, T1 and ISDN PRI telephone trunks. What you keep are handsets now connected to your corporate network and a high bandwidth WAN connection to your service provider.

What do you gain? No more capital investments for one thing. You move to a pricing model of so much per user per month. You also gain a myriad of additional features such as unified communications that include your smartphones, tablets, laptops and PCs into the communications system. Do you have HD voice? Probably not. HD voice is a VoIP technology that expands the transmitted audio band to increase the clarity of your “phone” calls.

Now that Hosted VoIP is a standard practice, the next step is to move the entire contact center to the cloud. XO Communications, a major player in cloud networking services, calls their system “Contact Center On Demand.” Have a look at this short video to see what it’s all about…


What XO will do for you is provide a single integrated solution that includes Hosted PBX and Contact Center on Demand. This is a comprehensive approach to your enterprise communications that gives you the quality and performance you need to support employees and customers with advanced features and a more attractive cost model. The system easily expands to include all of your business locations, along with mobile and remote workers.

What don’t you worry about any more? Equipment obsolescence, planning for large capital investments, limited feature sets, lack of mobile integration, on-going maintenance, inability to ramp up and down to accommodate seasonal spikes in call activity, and managing disaster backup and recovery.

Is your business ready to for more efficient and featured voice communications? Do the comparison between premises based business phone systems and Hosted PBX / Contact Center on Demand services. See what makes the most sense for your operations.

Fiber Optic Service FAQ, Part 2

Here are some more frequently asked questions and answers about fiber optic service for your business You may also be interested in the first list of fiber FAQs.

Q: What types of services are available over Ethernet fiber?

A: The Metro Ethernet Forum has standardized three popular services that are of interest to business users. Ethernet Private Line or E-Line is a dedicated point to point connection between two business locations or from your location to the Internet. Ethernet LAN or E-LAN provides a meshed network service that interconnects multiple locations. Ethernet Tree or E-Tree is a one to many connection popular with companies that distribute content to many subscribers.

Q: How do you connect multiple location LANs together

A: E-Line and E-LAN can do this easily. E-Line is appropriate for two locations to connect as a single bridged network. E-LAN makes sense for 3 or more locations, even those located internationally. E-LAN can make many separate LANs work like they are one larger network.

Q: What is Ethernet over SONET?

A: Most Ethernet providers offer a “native” Ethernet that powers their entire network. If you are in a location that can only get SONET, some carriers offer Ethernet that runs over the SONET fiber. From your prospective, this is the same as any other Ethernet over Fiber.

Q: Can Ethernet carriers interconnect?

A: Yes. The equipment that does this is called E-NNI or Ethernet Network to Network Interface. It allows service providers to seamlessly transfer network traffic back and forth. This allows both carriers to expand their service footprints to wider geographical areas.

Q: What are low latency fiber routes?

A: Most fiber networks strive to minimize latency or time delay between locations. Those advertised specifically as low latency routes are specially engineered to minimize the fiber route length using the straightest path available. They also minimize equipment along the route that can introduce additional latency. Low latency fiber services are in big demand for financial companies that deal in high speed trading.

Q: What is Metro Ethernet?

A: Metro Ethernet or MetroE is a fiber optic network that connects business and other locations within a limited geographic region, usually a single city or metropolitan area consisting of city and suburbs. MetroE connections can also connect to other locations nationally or worldwide.

Q: Does Ethernet support telephone service?

A: Ethernet is a great choice for enterprise VoIP phone service. A specialized service known as SIP Trunking connects your networked telephones or IP PBX to a distant service provider. The higher the bandwidth, the more simultaneous conversations can be supported. Traditional analog phones are better supported with analog phone lines or ISDN PRI service over T1 lines.

Q: Is Ethernet over Fiber distance limited like Ethernet over Copper?

A: No. Fiber offers unlimited transmission distance at any speed you wish. Most service providers have regional networks that serve multiple states or offer nationwide service. Some carriers connect worldwide using undersea cable between continents.

Are you interested in what fiber optic bandwidth service can do for your business? If so, get get instant online pricing up to 1 Gbps and complementary consultation with a bandwidth expert if you wish.


You may also be interested in reading Fiber Optic Service FAQs, Part 1 and Part 3.

Hosted PBX Adds Video Services

Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP, is becoming popular with large, medium and small businesses as a way to get the latest phone features without the big investment. Now that capability is being expanded to include video services as well.

MegaPath, a major competitive network carrier and cloud service provider, is adding cloud-delivered unified communications video services to its hosted PBX portfolio.

The key to video with voice is a new generation of business phones that replaces traditional analog desk phones and even VoIP digital phones. Polycom, one of the leaders in IP telephony, calls these media phones. These are telephones with video screens. Think of them as tablets that look like telephones. Some have cameras built-in. Others use a plug-in webcam.

Unified Communications (UC) is the process of combining voice, data and video on a single network. UC in the cloud is the next step. All you need are your company LAN and the network attached equipment that meets your business needs. In many cases, this is desktop computers and telephones. Everything else can go to the cloud. Add video capability and you have desktop conferencing without buying any new servers or making big changes to your network. All the complexity involved in making this work is handled out there in the cloud.

What are the advantages of adding video to your voice communications? You instantly have video conferencing without the infrastructure and inconvenience of setting up special video conference rooms and having people convene there at a particular time. Video conferencing has long been used as a substitute for expensive and time consuming travel. Desktop video conferencing takes that to the next level. Now you can have spontaneous or scheduled video conferences without having to uproot otherwise productive employees just to waste time gathering at the other end of the office.

Where else do you see this type of personalized video communications? Smartphones, of course. Also tablets, Ultrabooks and laptop computers. All of these have one thing in common: mobility.

The fact is that people don’t work in one particular location anymore. You may have your first conversations before you leave home in the morning or on the way to work. Then you spend some time at your desk along with moving around in the office. Many employees will leave the office building at some point to meet with clients or other business and personal related activities. In the old days that means having an operator take your incoming messages or letting callers record voicemail. You’d find out who was calling and why when you got back to your desk.

At the speed of business now, you can’t afford to be incommunicado for hours or even minutes. A missing employee can put an entire team project on hold. A sales prospect may well move on to the next vendor if they don’t get through to a person immediately. You need all of your communications integrated into one unified system.

This is where cloud-based PBX services shine. They support integrating desk phones and mobile phones in a process called Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). With the addition of video and single number calling, you are now connected at all times with the same feature set no matter where you happen to be.

Another feature of many hosted VoIP systems is HD audio. We’re used to the sound of standard “toll grade” voice quality. This has somewhat degraded with the introduction of mobile phones and some inadequate VoIP systems. HD audio reverses the trend to make VoIP a higher voice quality service than traditional analog and digital TDM arrangements.

Are you feeling that your current business phone system is hurting rather than enhancing your productivity. Are you having maintenance headaches or face a major capital investment in new equipment? Don’t commit yourself to any particular solution until you’ve had the chance to evaluate Hosted PBX Cloud Services for audio and video communications.

Technologies That Should Stay in 2012

Technology is said to be evolutionary, but it is often cumulative. We wind up buying the latest and greatest devices only to find that we still need to hang onto the last generation hardware and software in order to maintain compatibility with existing systems. Over time, the old fades and the new becomes dominant. Then the new, new comes along and it starts all over again. Let’s take a look at some technologies who’s time has come to fade into the background.

Analog phone systems with their dated feature set, lack of compatibility with mobile devices and proprietary wiring are about on the edge of extinction. Analog still makes sense for very small operations that have only a single phone per line and unreliable broadband. The voice quality is clear and the cost of one line is attractive. It was thought that VoIP would kill the old POTS (plain old telephone service) line. What does it in now is mobility.

Being tethered to a landline is a considerable inconvenience for a generation that is on the go most of the time. Who wants one phone number for the office, one for home and another for cellular, each with their own voicemail boxes? Some people do everything on their smartphone with the knowledge that they are always reachable. The smartphone also doubles as a small computer, making even the ubiquitous business laptop a relic.

Most companies really need and want desk phones and desktop computers, but they want them to work seamlessly with their mobile phone, their tablet, their laptop or notebook and perhaps M2M devices (machine to machine). This is where VoIP shines. The technology makes the telephone set just another network device. Gone is all that phone wiring and those old clunker phones that just make calls. The newer IP phones have displays and are easily integrated with computers.

What’s better than VoIP? It’s hosted VoIP. This is a cloud based service that replaces all your in-house PBX equipment. You keep your VoIP telephone sets and install a SIP trunk to the provider. That provider takes care of all the switching and connection to outside lines for the public phone system. In addition to simplicity of operation and maintenance and the avoidance of capital investments, hosted VoIP systems can often integrate mobile devices as well as fixed handsets. An advanced approach is called unified communications. That means one phone number for each person, not device. It also means that other types of communication, like email, text and FAX are available on whatever device you are using. No more need to haul around all that claptrap just to make sure that you aren’t missing some important message.

I should interject that one of the big motivators for enterprise VoIP systems is cost savings. This is even more so with hosted VoIP. You not only avoid the huge cost of upgrading and replacing PBX switching equipment, but the actual calling charges are also reduced. Most providers include all in-house and local calls in a fixed “seat” price per month. Some include nationwide calling as well. Features that cost extra with analog landline pricing, such as caller ID, call forwarding, conferencing and so on are built-into the VoIP service. You have the flexibility to scale the service up and down to match actual employee requirements rather that come up short on phones or be stuck with equipment and lines that you don’t use.

T1 bandwidth may be in its twilight time. This reliable technology has served us well for decades, but has become an increasing bottleneck with only 1.5 Mbps. That doesn’t cut it with todays demanding apps. Entry level for business connectivity is now 3 Mbps, with more and more companies asking for 10 or 20 Mbps connections. These are easily achieved with a replacement technology called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. The price for 3 Mbps EoC is about the same as one T1 line. The cost of 10 Mbps is only 2 or 3 times that. Even fiber bandwidth has become more affordable. A 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet or 1 Gbps GigE service is now well within the budgets for many medium size companies.

No need to dwell on pagers, Frame Relay Networks, 2G wireless, dial up modems, CRTs, bulletin boards, and 16 bit processors. They have been goners for years. How long before computer virus software, in-house server racks, proprietary wide area networks, and local disk storage join them? Their replacements are already available and being adopted by businesses who want to stay at the forefront of technology as a competitive advantage.

Will 2013 Be Your Year of the Cloud?

Cloud computing has been the hot topic of 2012. There are more vendors with more solutions than ever before. You no longer need the power of a super computer to justify using cloud services. The evolution of the cloud has progressed to the point where even commonly used resources may make more sense hosted remotely than in-house. So, is 2013 the year that you make the move to the cloud?

For many companies, that answer will be a resounding “Yes.” It’s a matter of economics, support and access. Doing everything yourself has the lure of being totally in control of your destiny. In return, you have to come up with the capital investment in new equipment, the staff to run everything and the ongoing cost of maintenance. Often, that means giving up the ability to respond quickly to a changing business environment. It’s just too expensive to have personnel and equipment on standby, “just in case.”

Another strong selling point of many cloud providers is that they can afford to keep with the very latest technology trends. You may have to wait until your equipment is fully depreciated or until you can come up with the funding in order to get all the latest features available on the newest models of equipment. Hotly competing cloud companies have no choice but to stay at the cutting edge of technology or risk being put out of business by other more nimble providers.

Disaster recovery can be much easier with a cloud-based system. The cloud operator builds in the necessary redundancies, including geographical diversity so that no single event can knock out the whole system. All you need is access. That’s a lot easier to come by than having to reorder an entire data center’s worth of equipment and software and getting it up and running. Even with remote or cloud backup, it can take days or weeks to fully download and restore your business database. With everything in the cloud, the data is online at all times and unaffected by situations that cut off your connectivity or destroy your local offices.

Some companies have unusually high bandwidth requirements. Content providers who stream video over the Internet or provide programming to Internet Service Providers require massive amounts of bandwidth. It’s not uncommon to need 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps or even 40 Gbps to support live streaming of multiple HD video programs. That kind of bandwidth is readily available in cloud data centers, but might not be available locally. You may be faced with moving your operation in order to get the fiber optic connections you need to conduct business. If your servers are in the cloud with high speed connections it takes the pressure off the line speed requirements from your office to the cloud.

What’s available now in the cloud? It’s pretty much everything you need to run a small, medium or large scale business. Virtual servers with virtual storage give you all the computing power and disk space that you’ll ever need. You can ramp these resources up and down using a desktop control panel in real time. This is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Along with the infrastructure, you are going to need software. Software as a Service (SaaS) complements IaaS so that you pay by the month by usage for all your software and hardware. A related component, Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the cloud version of a development system where you get things customized and working. You only buy this as you need to do development. Security as a Service is a add-on feature that protects your network from intrusion. Once again, it is running from within the cloud.

Even the telephone system has a cloud equivalent. This is called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. The switching system and connection to the public telephone network is all done by the cloud service provider. You install SIP telephones that connect to your network and use a special line called a SIP trunk to connect with the provider. You no longer need to buy and maintain an in-house PBX. Some vendors will even include free SIP phones with your service.

Have you been watching cloud developments but hesitant to get involved? This is a great time to get competitive prices and features on cloud computing and communications appropriate for your size business. If you like the answers, you can easily sign up for service and enjoy the new features and cost savings for all of 2013.

Can Hosted Voice Cut Your Phone Costs In Half?

A generation ago, a big cost savings opportunity was switching to a competing long distance telephone service provider. Both businesses and consumers went on a stampede once deregulation opened the door for competitors to the incumbent local phone companies and their lock on long distance prices. The real enabler was making the process all but invisible to the customer. Sure, there was some arcane procedural work involved in having your 1+ calls go to supplier B rather than supplier A. You didn’t have to deal with that. You simply called your new provider, fill out some paperwork or signed up online. The magic happened in a week or two and, suddenly, your long distance bills were lower.

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.

The PBX Disappears With Hosted Voice

Medium and large companies are used to managing their own phone systems. It seems to go without saying that if you want to be able to make inter-office calls, you need to have a PBX or at least Key telephone system in-house. Hosted voice service says quite the opposite. With hosted voice, you only need to provide the phones. Sometimes even those are provided for you.

Hosted Voice, also known as Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX, is a cloud service. The PBX phone system hasn’t magically disappeared. It’s simply been relocated from your building to the service provider’s.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because this is the model most companies used about half a century ago. What? You don’t recognize it? Back in the day, we all got our phones from Ma Bell and let her do the switching.

Centralized switching at the local phone company is what built the Bell system. That worked perfectly for residential users and small businesses. Larger companies wanted control of their calling and installed switchboards with operators. Later, when technology enabled it, they tore out the switchboards and installed automatic switching equipment. The phone company had an answer to the PBX. It’s called Centrex. They move the switching back to their “cloud” and handle internal as well as external calls.

There are a number of advantages to dumping the switched circuit model of Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) and moving toward what is known as network voice. What’s changed over the last few decades is that every company now has a computer network. What they may not recognize is that the telephone system is also a network. It’s just a different and very specialized network. Why have two networks when you can combine them and maintain just one network?

It no longer makes sense to add modems to computers so they can run on the telephone network. Computer networks are so large and so fast that they have left voice lines in the dust. Instead, it makes more sense to modify telephones so that they can run on the computer networks. Telephones that have this capability are called IP phones or SIP phones. SIP is the switching system used by VoIP telephone systems.

The term VoIP or Voice over IP describes the nature of this system. You are transporting telephone calls, or voice, over IP Networks. Your LAN is an IP network. The IP stands for Internet Protocol, regardless of whether it is connected to the actual Internet or not.

This is how hosted voice works. Your PBX and analog telephones are hauled away for salvage or resale. In their place you get brand new IP phones that you unpack and plug into your network just like you would a computer or a printer. Then you pick up the phone to place a call and...

Oh, wait. You can’t make a call until you get a phone line to your network. That line is called a SIP Trunk. The SIP Trunk is what connects you to your service provider. At your end is a voice gateway installed by the service provider. At the far end is their very large telephone switching system, called a soft switch, and all the outside phone trunks that connect it to the public telephone system.

There’s a caveat here. Some smaller businesses try to cheap out and use the Internet to provide the connection to their phone service provider. That’s a pretty dicey arrangement because the Internet doesn’t offer any QoS or Quality of Service mechanisms. Your voice packets and the neighborhood kid’s pirated movie packets are all jammed together with no priority for anyone. If traffic backs up, it’s just like the tollway at rush hour. Everything creeps along and your phone conversations get choppy. They might even drop completely.

The best practice is to get your SIP Trunk from the same company that is providing your hosted voice service. They will give you a line that serves up telephone calls and the Internet without any interference between the two. As a single provider, they are responsible for both the line and the phone service. They’ll manage this arrangement to make sure both work optimally.

Regardless of the size of your business, it is well worth your while to investigate the features and cost savings from hosted voice solutions. Savings can be as high as 50% and you may be able to include your mobile phones as well as your office phones.

Transforming the WAN Into The Smart WAN

We often think of WAN connections as dumb pipes. Perhaps even the “series of tubes” that Senator Ted Stevens envisioned as a model for the Internet. Data goes in one end and comes out the other. Does it need to be any more sophisticated than that?

These days it truly does. The move from predominately in-house data centers and simple file transfers over the LAN to cloud hosted systems, VoIP telephony and video content has changed what we need from the WAN. Level 3 calls this the Smart WAN. This short animated video illustrates the difference...



Clearly, if you’re sitting in line at the bank drive-through, watching people load their transactions into those plastic carriers and shooting them through the vacuum tubes to the tellers, and start thinking, “Hmmm. That’s not a bad model for my WAN network,” you could be in serious need of a Smart WAN upgrade.

It all starts with a smart pipe to replace dumb pipe technology. Instead of just cramming everything down the same conduit without regard to content, you need put some method into the madness. That means CoS or Class of Service. CoS recognizes that some packets are more sensitive than others to vagaries of the network. Most sensitive is anything operating two-way in real time. VoIP telephony will fail when it encounters the least blockage or delay in the WAN. Video conferencing has a similar sensitivity to network characteristics.

What CoS does is assign different classes or priorities to different packet streams. Brute force file transfers go to the bottom of the list. It is important that the files get from point A to point B intact, but a little delay here and there won’t make any difference. The same is true for email and most messaging. Interactive business applications are a step higher. If you are interacting with SaaS in the cloud and expect it be as responsive as if it were running on the servers down the hall, your network has to make these interactions transparent. Bandwidth constrictions and latency can raise employee frustrations to a fever pitch, if not kill productivity completely.

Enterprise VoIP on converged IP networks offers major cost reductions and added productivity features for businesses that can make it work. The Hosted PBX model adds another layer of sensitivity because the WAN gets involved in handling voice traffic as well as data. Latency, jitter and packet loss wreak havoc with voice communications. Just because convergence works on your LAN doesn’t mean that sending the same traffic down a dumb pipe will give an equally good result.

Now consider having the same set of services expecting the same quality for multiple business locations, including headquarters, branch offices, retail locations, warehouses and factories. Clearly, some intelligence needs to be injected to the WAN network to ensure that every location has the same connectivity and quality of service as every other.

Has your company grown beyond the capability of simple, dumb WAN connections to ensure quality and reliability of service? If so, it’s time to consider a Smart WAN upgrade for your network operations. You may even find that this improved performance comes at equal or less cost that what you have now.

One SIP Trunk Beats Two T1 Lines

In traditional thinking, you have your business telephone service and you have your business broadband service. One tends to have nothing to do with the other. In fact, you probably buy them from different providers. There’s a good reason to reconsider that approach now. You can get the same or better results for less money. How? With a service called SIP Trunking.

SIP Trunking has nothing to do with luggage or elephants. It’s all about delivering modern telecom services. Trunking is a technical term that means using a single line or other communications path to transport many different transmissions simultaneously. The telephone industry had a pressing need for trunks to handle the explosive growth of telegraph and, later, telephone lines. Both wired and wireless analog carrier systems were developed to consolidate many telephone lines into a few trunks. This was especially critical for connecting telephone switching systems in different towns or states.

The trunk lines that we are most familiar with today are T1 telephone lines or ISDN PRI. These are two slightly different standards for a digital telephone line that carries as many as two dozen simultaneous phone calls. T1 or ISDN PRI trunks are very popular for corporate PBX phone systems or call centers. Both need large numbers of outside phone lines to communicate.

In actuality, ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface uses a T1 line to deliver 23 phone lines in individual digital channels plus one specialized channel used for switching, signaling and data such as Caller ID. The T1 voice or T1 telephone lines uses all 24 available channels for phone calls, but doesn’t offer Caller ID and has slower call setup times.

T1 lines are pretty versatile. A lot of companies have two T1 lines coming into the building. One carries IDSN PRI with anywhere between 10 and 23 outside phone lines. The other T1 line provides dedicated broadband Internet access for the computer network. The bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps for both upload and download. Even though there are two T1 lines installed, one has nothing to do with the other. They are electrically separate and may have been ordered from two different service providers.

The cost of two separate T1 lines is more than many smaller businesses can justify. They don’t need anywhere close to 23 outside lines, often less than half that, and 1.5 Mbps Internet access is plenty for credit card verification, online ordering, file transfers, email, and casual Web access. They could probably get by with half an ISDN PRI and half a T1 Internet line if they could buy half a service for each.

SIP Trunking gives you that half-a-service option by combining voice and data onto a single converged trunk line. That could be a T1 line or an Ethernet over Copper connection that uses the same twisted pair telco wiring but offers high bandwidth options. Actually, a single SIP trunk is better than two half-T1 lines. It also costs less than those two T1s you may have now.

The SIP in SIP Trunking stands for Session Initiation Protocol. That’s the switching technology used in VoIP telephone systems. A SIP phone is a VoIP telephone that can plug right into your network. Older analog phones can be turned into SIP phones by using Analog Telephone Adaptors (ATA).

Now, here’s what SIP Trunking does to consolidate lines. A SIP Trunk carries both voice and data simultaneously. It can do that because both are in the same packet network protocol. The broadband Internet data is already packetized. By using adaptors or SIP phones, the telephones are made to look like other network devices. Once everything is communicating in packets, a single line can transport both.

One question you probably have immediately is about how the SIP trunk prevents telephone conversations from being garbled when computers are sending data. Companies that have tried to use broadband phone services to share their Internet service find that performance is iffy. Sometimes the conversations sound good. Other times, not so good. That’s because the Internet doesn’t treat sensitive voice conversations any differently than file transfers or video downloads. One packet is just like the next on the internet.

A SIP trunk uses Internet technology, but it doesn’t use the Internet itself. The SIP trunk is a private line between your company and your service provider. Once your packets get to the service provider they are switched onto the Internet or onto the public phone system, depending on where they are supposed to go. The SIP trunk is engineered to ensure that telephone calls do not contend with data packets for use of the trunk line.

Here’s how that works. The interface equipment, managed routers, at each end of the SIP trunk are set up to establish Class of Service (CoS) for each of the many simultaneous signals that travel over the trunk. Telephone calls have priority in this system. Whenever a call is in progress, it takes the bandwidth needed to ensure high voice quality. Only the bandwidth not used for telephone calls is available to transport broadband Internet service. When a call hangs up, data packets can now use the additional bandwidth no longer commandeered by the phone call.

Obviously, you can’t have dozens of phone calls on a T1 line being used as a SIP trunk or your Internet access will slow to a crawl. Most small companies don’t have that problem. They may need only 6 to 12 outside lines at the most. Even those lines aren’t engaged 100%. The result is that there is plenty of bandwidth for both telephone calls and broadband access at the same time.

Efficiency is what makes SIP trunks a better value than separate T1 lines for voice and data. By actively managing the available bandwidth, a SIP trunk makes unused bandwidth available for Internet service while ensuring that every telephone call has the resources it needs for a high quality conversation.

Are you in the market for both telephone and business broadband service or concerned that you are paying more than you should for these two services? If so, get SIP trunking pricing and options to see if this service is right for your business.

E911 For Enterprise VoIP

The move from switched circuit to packet switched telephony has created some unintended consequences. One of these is emergency calling to 911. We take the 911 system for granted. When disaster strikes, just punch in those three little numbers and help will be on the way. Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Now consider this. There’s a fire in the maintenance closet down the hall and it’s getting out of control. You pick up your handset and dial 911. You reach the emergency operator and report the fire, then run out of the building and across the street. An hour later, the facility has burned to the ground and no fire trucks have shown up. How could this happen?

The fire trucks did show up within 5 minutes of your call. Unfortunately, they went to your main office in Phoenix. You just called from the satellite office in Indianapolis. Oops! Something is not set up properly on your VoIP phone system.

Such a problem would never arise on an analog landline phone. Why? Because the phone wire is in the ground at it always goes the same place. That’s why they call it a landline. VoIP, however, is a network service. As long as a SIP phone can connect to the network, it can make a call. It makes no difference where that connection takes place. Networks that encompass multiple locations need special consideration when they are converged for voice and data. The same technology that makes it easy to move phones around also makes it easy to lose track of just where they are plugged-in. This is especially true if any of your phones connect via the Internet.

XO Communications, a leader in enterprise VoIP deployments, has an instructional video called “9 Ways to Ensure E911 VoIP Service for Enterprise VoIP Deployments.” Have a look now and see if there is something needing your attention...



Make no mistake about it. VoIP technologies, including Hosted PBX and Unified Communications, offer enormous benefits in cost reduction and employee productivity improvement. Like all new technology, the more cutting edge the solution, the trickier it is to get it right. You want to be working with a top-tier service provider who understands the legal requirements for issues such as E911 and has processes in-place to ensure that your system is set up accurately.

If you are considering an upgrade to your business phone system, get recommendations, options and pricing on competing telephony solutions. Be sure you understand how they ensure accurate E911 call routing.

Cloud Hosting Providers For Converged Networks

Cloud computing services are growing geometrically. If you haven’t gotten on-board yet, it’s probably because you aren’t convinced of the cost savings, security or the ability of the cloud to cover all bases for your IT needs. That picture is changing rapidly. Let’s take a snapshot of what’s available now for SMB users.

When we think of cloud computing, the picture that comes to mind is one of a giant brain in the sky that runs operations for hundreds or thousands of companies. That’s the approach that gets all the press, but it’s far from the entirety of the market. Indeed, there are many other providers out there who can deliver the virtual services you need on a less grand scale. You may not be able to get everything from one service provider, but the building blocks are out there to handle your voice and data needs.

That’s important, because enterprise VoIP solutions are driving a trend toward converged networks. If you only consider moving traditional data center servers to the cloud, you’ll be missing a big piece of the puzzle. The other trend that’s important is fixed mobile convergence that integrates cell phones into your telecom infrastructure. Mobility can be the link that makes or breaks your productivity in the future.

The foundation of cloud computing is cloud hosting that incorporates Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Cloud infrastructure is virtualization on steroids. IT departments have found that virtualizing servers ups the efficiency of the physical server hardware. What cloud computing does is greatly expand the virtualization to include huge racks of high performance servers plus storage and bandwidth. It differs from the virtualization that you would do yourself or the virtual servers you’d rent from a colocation center in that it is sold incrementally on-demand. You pay by the minute, by the hour or by the number of CPU cycles used.

Another characteristic of cloud hosting is that it is highly elastic or scalable. If you start to run out of capacity, you simply order up more virtual servers. The cloud operating system takes care of how these resources work in concert to provide the capacity you need. At no point do you have to purchase, install or maintain any equipment. The cloud service provider takes care of this with a 24/7 technical staff.

There are actually three types of clouds to choose from. The one that first comes to mind is the public cloud that serves many users simultaneously. You gain access via a private line or dedicated Internet service. Companies that have highly sensitive applications, unique requirements or simply want more control go with a private cloud. That is a similar infrastructure to the public cloud but on a scale suitable for one company. The hybrid cloud is a combination of the two. Public facing or non-critical applications run on the public cloud, while a separate private cloud handles very sensitive applications.

While cloud computing is thought of a data processing service, there is also a voice cloud known as cloud communications or hosted PBX. In this case, the computing resources are specific to telephony needs and the connectivity is by SIP trunk from your location and to the public switched telephone network from the provider. You no longer need a PBX phone system in-house or any telephone trunk lines. What you have is SIP telephones connected to your network and a converged SIP trunk from your business location or locations to the service provider. Some hosted PBX systems integrate cell phones into the system so that you have the same capabilities while mobile as at your desk.

Some of the cloud services you can readily get include cloud hosting, hosted PBX, unified communications, enterprise cloud security, private/public clouds, cloud storage, hosted Exchange, SharePoint, disaster recovery, anti-spam and anti-virus, hosted firewalls, and dedicated cloud access connections.

Are you feeling that you may be missing out on productivity improvements, cost savings, agility of scaling your business, or advanced features available in the cloud? This would be a good time to explore options with multiple cloud hosting providers. You can start small and grow or make a step-change relocation to the cloud, depending on what works best for your company.

SIP over MPLS for Enterprise VoIP

SIP Trunking is widely popular for smaller businesses who can save on their monthly telecom bill by getting both their telephone and Internet broadband services on a single integrated line. SIP Trunking is also a cost saver for large corporate headquarters or call centers that need many outside phone lines and already have converged voice and data LANs. But what about the organization with multiple locations?

The answer may well be SIP over MPLS. You may already have an MPLS network in place for sharing data files between branch offices and headquarters. Cost tradeoffs almost always give the advantage to an MPLS network over a suite of point to point data lines of equivalent bandwidth. With MPLS, you only need a last mile connection to each of your locations. As the name implies, these are point to point pipes measuring just thousands of feet to the nearest central office. The major distance spans are handled by the fiber optic core of the MPLS network.

There are also security advantages with MPLS versus IP networking, such as the Internet. MPLS uses proprietary labels to direct traffic, not the IP header information that is often the target of malicious activity. The network is privately operated and not accessible by the general public. You need to be a contracted customer with defined locations and connections between them that are managed by the network operator.

What you may not realize is that MPLS networks can handle voice traffic as well as data. The name MPLS actually stands for Multi-Protocol Label Switching. The network can handle nearly any protocol and is perfect for packet switched services of all types. For larger organizations, MPLS provides the WAN connections you need to link a few or many converged voice and data networks.

Do you currently have data connections between your sites but stand-alone analog or PRI telephone lines at each? That works, but you are probably paying toll charges to call between offices. There’s no economy of scale if each facility is relatively small and in a different city or state than the others. By consolidating your telephony, data lines and perhaps broadband connectivity with a single provider you can likely realize a considerable cost savings while maintaining call quality and network speed.

The MPLS labels or tags do their magic by not only specifying packet destinations, but also class of service. This keeps data file transfers from damaging the much more fragile real-time demands of voice and video. If you have company wide VoIP now and conversations get distorted or calls drop when the network gets congested, traffic engineering is what you need. MPLS networks are engineered with committed rates for your services, as well as those of other network customers. That ensures that you have the bandwidth you purchase regardless of what anyone else is doing. Contrast that commitment with the best-effort information services, such as the Internet, where performance is all over the map.

With SIP over MPLS, your telephone calls within the company stay on-net and off the public switched telephone network. You don’t pay toll charges for office calls that stay on your network regardless of whether they are from desks twenty feet apart or branch offices thousands of miles apart. It’s even possible to include international locations on the same MPLS network to truly integrate your company communications. When calls go off-net to outside landlines or mobile phones, those terminations are handled by your SIP Trunking service provider. Since the network is converged, there is no need for a separate telephone network and your support needs may also be reduced.

Does your organization have multiple locations that could be more efficiently run by a voice and data MPLS network? Get pricing for MPLS Network Services quickly and easily to compare with your current bills.

PRI Phone Line Connections

Traditional analog business phone lines are useful in very small retail and office locations and any business where just a few outside lines are all you need. Once you accumulate more than half a dozen, it’s time to look at a telephone trunk like option like ISDN PRI.

ISDN PRI stands for Integrated Services Digital Network Primary Rate Interface. Now you know why they abbreviate it. ISDN is a set of standards for how to transmit phone calls digitally on ordinary telephone wire. PRI is the larger of two major options. The other, BRI or Basic Rate Interface, provides two telephone lines, one telephone and one 64 Kbps data line, or a 128 Kbps data line. It’s mostly used for low speed data connections or to transmit high quality audio for broadcast and production.

PRI is the business telephone trunk service that is highly popular for use with PBX phone systems. PRI is transmitted on a T1 line using two twisted copper pair. Chances are you are already familiar with T1 lines for dedicated Internet access at 1.5 Mbps. ISDN PRI, also called T1 PRI, uses the same T1 line technology. In fact, T1 lines were originally designed to transport telephone conversations in bulk between telco switching offices.

What do you get with ISDN PRI service? A single trunk can support up to 23 separate phone conversations, each in its own time division multiplexed channel. Think of these as the equivalent of 23 outside lines. Each line can be set up for local, long distance, incoming only, outgoing only, toll free or some combination. There are actually 24 channels on the T1 line. The last one is reserved for switching signals to support the other 23 plus data such as Caller ID.

ISDN PRI lines almost always plug into an interface card made especially for this purpose. There’s at least one in most PBX phone systems. Some have four or more ISDN PRI connectors so that you can add dozens of outside lines if your operation is large enough to need them. Call centers are big users of ISDN PRI, as are large business offices.

PRI pricing has been getting better over the years, following the declining cost of T1 lines. A few years ago, PRI became more cost effective when you exceeded 10 or 12 outside phone lines. Today, that number is more like 6 or 10 lines, depending on where you are located.

Other than analog phone lines, the direct competitor to ISDN PRI is SIP Trunking. PRI is a traditional telephone technology that connects your PBX system to the public switched telephone network. SIP Trunking is a packet based technology originally designed to support enterprise VoIP telephone systems. SIP Trunks connect directly to converged networks for enterprise VoIP support and can supply both phone and Internet service for smaller companies. SIP Trunks can also be ordered with analog, IP or PRI handoffs to connect to any PBX telephone system.

What type of telephone trunk line is best for your particular situation? Consider the interfaces you have available and get competitive prices and availability for business telephone lines and trunks to make a good decision.