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.

Cloud Hosted IP PBX For Features and Cost Savings

Is this the right time to move your business telephone services to the cloud? You are clearly at a decision point if your current system has run out of capacity, frequently needs repair or is no longer supported. But even if what you have in-house is working fine, you could be missing the opportunity to add productivity features or reduce your communications costs that the latest generation of hosted PBX solutions offer.

A good example is the new version 2.0 Cloud Hosted IP PBX from Airespring called AirePBX. This system completely integrates your fixed and mobile voice communications across all devices and all business locations. That’s important because smartphones are often left out of the loop with traditional PBX systems. If you have branch offices or have grown your business through acquisition, chances are that you have a hodgepodge of telephone equipment unique to each location.

It’s not hard to see how telecom managers can become frustrated when asked to do anything but make voice calls over the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). With most telephony solutions, the PSTN is the only common denominator. That can leave you wanting for some of the newest and most popular calling features. It can also be a source of unnecessary costs if you must use the public telephone network when you could be using your own data network.

AirePBX, like other hosted VoIP solutions, takes the job of managing a telephone network out of your hands and into a service cloud managed by specialists. With hosted PBX, there is very little in the way of telephone equipment onsite. The PBX goes away. So does all that telephone wiring. You no longer need telephone lines or trunks for outside calls, because that is all handled in the cloud. What you have is telephones that plug right into your LAN and an on-premise enterprise grade session border controller to manage VoIP and data traffic.

What kind of features can you expect with a hosted solution? AirePBX offers HD voice for sound clarity beyond what you think a telephone is capable of. It has a full featured auto attendant, or automated receptionist. With this, even the smallest companies can make a big impression on their customers without having to hire a dedicated operator. You can swap devices mid-call. If someone calls your office phone as you are about to leave your desk, quickly switch the call to your smartphone and continue the conversation on the go. Of course, you also get advanced call routing, find me/follow me, simultaneous ring, caller ID, call forwarding, call park, call transfer, conferencing, fax to email, unified visual voice mail, three-way calling, toll-free numbers, virtual extensions and the ability to manage it all using an online management portal.

Sounds good, but don’t you have to spend a lot of money upgrading your phones? Not at all. AirePBX provides advanced IP desk phones as part of your service at no extra charge. You also get the session border controller at no charge and free professional on-site install. You simply pay per seat per month for the number of phones, “seats”, that you are using. When you need more, you can easily add them. You never pay for capacity that you aren’t using. That alone gives you a business flexibility that you probably don’t have now.

What are the cost savings? AireSpring estimates that you can save up to 50% over the cost of traditional telephone service by moving your PBX or Key System to the cloud. How much can you save? Why not get a quote for cloud hosted IP PBX service from AireSpring and other competitive providers and find out. You could be looking at a major reduction in your communications expenses with better performance as well.

How Does a VoIP Call Work?

VoIP telephony is in the process of displacing traditional landlines, include digital trunks such as T1 and ISDN PRI. What is it that is different about VoIP phone calls and what advantages does this technology offer?

You’ll hear VoIP referred to as a network service rather than a telephone service. This is an important distinction for network engineers and business owners, but not of much concern to users. One telephone set looks pretty much like another. When you lift the handset, you expect to hear dial tone and be able to dial out. When the phone rings, you expect to pick up the handset and hear the party on the other end and have a conversation.

A lot of engineering work has gone into making VoIP phone calls mimic traditional landline telephone calls as much as possible. The ideal has been that you shouldn’t be able to tell a difference. Now that this goal has been generally achieved, the new ideal is to make VoIP calls sound more lifelike than anything you’ve heard through a telephone. It’s something called HD or high definition voice.

The telephone connection is what determines whether you are using traditional telephony or VoIP. A traditional analog telephone line is based on technology that goes back over a century. It consists of two copper wires twisted together that connect a particular phone all the way to the telephone company office and into the central switching system. This line has certain AC and DC voltages and other characteristics. Often the phone line provides power to the telephone set. The phone itself has evolved from electromechanical components to relatively simple electronics. It just needs to have the proper characteristics to interface with the analog line.

This carries over to in-house telephone systems such as Key telephones or Private Branch Exchange (PBX). These are small switching systems that handle internal calls to keep them off the public telephone network. The in-house phone system connects to each phone in the company with a pair of wires that mimic the line from the phone company.

VoIP uses your company computer network as its phone line. For this to work, the phone has to include circuitry that makes it look like a network peripheral and be compatible with everything else on the network, including computers, printers, servers and so on. Phones that do this are called IP phones or SIP phones. They have a standard RJ-45 Ethernet jack on the back of the phone to connect to the network. They can be powered over this same connection by special POE (Power over Ethernet) switches or have separate plug-in power supplies to operate the internal electronics.

Smaller companies and residential users of VoIP can use regular telephone sets by plugging them into an ATA or Analog Telephone Adapter. This adapter has the electronics that you would find inside an IP Telephone.

VoIP gets its name from Voice over Internet Protocol. That doesn’t mean it has to run on the Internet, although some low cost VoIP services do use the Internet as your line to the service provider in order to save money. IP or Internet Protocol describes the technology used by Ethernet Local Area Networks. It’s what makes the Internet work and also runs many networks that don’t connect to the public Internet.

Actually, it’s easier to achieve high voice quality by avoiding the public Internet completely and connecting to your phone service provider through an extension of your network called a SIP Trunk. SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is the switching technology for VoIP systems. The SIP Trunk takes the place of the analog, T1 or ISDN PRI telephone line that normally goes to the local telephone company.

You can set up a VoIP telephone system in your company that shares your computer network, including any WAN (Wide Area Network) connections between business locations. You’ll install a IP PBX to handle switching calls between office phones and connect to your service provider for outside lines. A newer option is to skip the IP PBX and rent Hosted PBX telephone switching from the same service provider that connects you to the public phone system. This saves a major investment and allows you to add more phones as you need them.

Are you considering installing a new business phone system or expanding or replacing one you already have? Get features and pricing for hosted PBX and telephone trunking optionsto help decide what makes the most sense for your company.

Hosted Voice Goes Mobile

There’s a major migration in progress right now. Can you guess what it is? If you answered “to the cloud,” you’d be right, of course. If you answered “PBX to the cloud,” you’d have read my mind. Companies are abandoning their PBX telephone systems in favor of cloud communications systems. You may know these as hosted PBX or hosted VoIP. Now, that also includes mobile.

Megapath’s Hosted Voice Mobile gives you the ability to have one-number VoIP calling from your desk phone, desktop computer or smartphone. The key is the one-number capability. Do you have one of those business cards with half a dozen different phone numbers? I’ll bet that confuses your customers and prospects. Hey, what are you supposed to do. You can’t be in the office all the time. Sometimes you are at your desk, sometimes you are out and about, the rest of the time you are at home. If a really important call comes in you aren’t about to quibble that you are “off duty” at home.

Legacy approaches to solving this problem include having a calling service that will try to locate you, carrying a pager (very legacy), remembering to forward to your phones, one by one, when you make a move, having a secretary take messages for you and leave them on your desk or just relying on voice mail that you check all the time. None of these approaches has been ideal, but they sure beat missing a critical communication.

This is where cloud technology shines. Location doesn’t mean a thing to the cloud, because it covers all locations. With cloud services you can be anywhere and access your account in the cloud using whatever compatible device you happen to have handy. With Hosted Voice Mobile, you use an easy-to-manage Web portal that controls call routing using a single VoIP number. That’s right. You hand out one number and know that you’ll get calls to that number no matter where you happen to be.

Hosted PBX systems relieve you of the responsibility to maintain a small telephone switching system in your back room. This function moves to a much larger platform at your cloud service provider. All you have in-house are IP phones, a voice gateway that delivers telephone services, plus your mobile smartphones. The hosted system contains the functionality for such features as Find Me / Follow Me and Visual Voicemail. Now that includes your smartphone as well as your desk phone.

Megapath goes beyond some of the basic hosted PBX services to include features like HD voice for crystal clear call quality, free domestic calling that includes long distance and the ability to replicate key telephone systems.

What’s a key system? If you have a phone system that has individual buttons for all the outside phone lines, you have a key system. Key phones have lights next to each line switch so you know when the line is busy. If you want to make an outgoing call, you select an unused line. If you want to join a conversation in progress, you push the button for that line and you are conferenced in.

PBX telephone systems differ from key systems in that the PBX manages the outside lines. You don’t have the ability to pick a line and probably don’t even know how many lines there are. They are placed in a pool and assigned as needed. That’s when an incoming call comes into the system, or someone requests an outside line by dialing a number, usually “9.”

Are you feeling constrained by the limitations of your present phone system or are experiencing outages that are time consuming and expensive? Before you get a loan to buy yet another in-house phone system, check out the options available with one of the newer hosted VoIP systems. You’ll avoid large capital investments, pay per seat per month, and gain valuable features such as mobile integration that you don’t have now. Compare competitive cloud hosted communications systems with what you have now and see what you’ve been missing.

Enterprise Communications Services To The Cloud

There’s a great migration underway. This is a technical migration, from the public switched telephone network and private branch exchanges to cloud based communications services. XO communications is a leader in cloud communication services. Here’s why they predict that in the next few years 60% of companies will move close to a third of their voice communications to the cloud...



If you would like a complementary consultation and competitive quotes for your enterprise communication needs, we can offer you prompt and courteous service through our affiliated Telarus product specialists.

So, is it time to rethink your approach to voice communications, such as business telephone? You know that the upgrades you want to make are going to cost a fortune in up-front capital at a time when big capital outlays are frowned upon. You could just let the whole thing go until the economy picks up steam and money flows like water. But...

Here’s the problem. You want and need the productivity improvements you can get with unified communications right now. You may also suspect that you are spending too much on operations and maintenance, and rightly so. The dilemma is that with traditional approaches you can’t afford to make the changes that will give you the available savings.

Now, here’s the solution. It’s called communications as a service. Instead of trying to be in the telephone business yourself, turn that over to experts in enterprise level VoIP over MPLS networks. That way, you can get all of your many business locations on the same network using the same equipment with the same connectivity. You can get niceties like HD voice and video, mobility integration, plus calling features you don’t have now. Best of all, you pay as you go with a predictable per-user monthly cost.

No need to stay mired in limbo. XO cloud communications and other competitive carriers offer migration paths where you can integrate what you have now while you gradually shift to the new cloud solution. Eventually, you just pull the plug on the old PBX and PSTN trunk lines when you no longer need them.

Does pay as you go sound like a better business model for these days than invest and wait years for a payback? If so, you owe it to yourself to take a few minutes and get a complementary consultation and competitive quotes for enterprise services in the cloud.

How HD Audio Will Transform VoIP

Those of us old enough to remember when phones were analog and switches were mechanical have a soft spot for the clarity of the old school system. There was a distinctness and intimacy to those old time conversations that has long been lost. Well, perhaps lost only for some decades. There’s a new move afoot to give VoIP phone conversations a starting fidelity that will make today’s handsets and cellphones seem like toy walkie talkies by comparison.

The technology is HD or high definition audio. It’s called HD Voice by Polycom, the telephone manufacturer producing IP telephones with this capability built-in. The idea is to reverse the steady decline in voice intelligibility that we’ve experienced with the digital transformation and create a new standard that is superior to anything that has come before.

There’s a parallel here. Something similar happened in the radio industry. If you’ve ever owned one of those big console radios from the 1930’s or even the table models from the 50’s, you know that AM radio can sound amazingly lifelike. The advent of transistor radios shrunk the size of the loudspeakers, and thus the range of sound frequencies that can be heard. “Tinny” was the word to describe the loss of low end or bass notes. Car radios added their own restrictions by rolling off the high frequencies to reduce noise and static. It took a new technology, FM radio, to expand the frequency range and eliminate the background noise before the term high fidelity could be applied.

Old-timey phones had very few parts. The carbon microphone and electromagnetic earphone were powered by a battery at the phone company and connected to a similar phone at the other end. There were no electronics in the circuit. The telephone company switch was really a mechanical switch that simply connected phones together. The resulting sound had a richness that made local conversations much closer to someone sitting next to you than you hear today.

I remember when I first noticed the difference. It was when the company I worked for upgraded their old phone system with a new digital PBX and desksets. The first calls seemed slightly more muffled, less sparkling clear on the new phones. The effect was subtle, but noticeable. There was no noise or distortion apparent, but something was missing.

What was missing, I later figured out, was some of the audio range in the conversation. It wasn’t digital that degraded phone audio specifically. It started with long distance calling. The analog carrier multiplexing used to load multiple conversations onto copper wire and microwave trunk lines needed filters to keep one conversation from interfering with another. After much research, a frequency range of 300 to 3400 Hz was selected as standard. Frequencies above 3400 Hz add to naturalness, but don’t limit understandability of speech very much. Get rid of them and you can transmit more telephone channels on a trunk. You also get rid of annoying hiss, which is a high frequency phenomena. Frequencies below 300 Hz also aren’t necessary for intelligibility, but certainly give voices and other sounds their distinctiveness. By getting rid of the low frequencies, problems with power line hum getting into phone lines are greatly reduced or eliminated.

This standard was maintained when the industry changed from analog to digital. It kept everything compatible and consistent. Digital technology was a boon to long distance calls, especially overseas. It totally eliminated the noise and crosstalk that were common in the analog era. That advantage went away with cell phones, which can be noisy or even drop out.

Early implementations of VoIP only made matters worse. Packet transmission added distortion from lost packets and variable transmission time or jitter. Latency, a time delay through the network, was almost unknown with analog and TDM telephony. Now it’s not uncommon on poorly implemented systems to have a clipping effect so that you can’t both talk at the same time.

What HD audio intends to do is to lift telephone voice quality to a new standard above and beyond what we’ve ever had. This is accomplished by using a wideband CODEC (Coder/Decoder) to handle the conversion from analog microphone and earpiece to digital transmission. Bandwidth is doubled to 7 kHz with the new standard G.722 Codec and can be extended up to 20 Khz, the same quality as CDs and digital FM radio.

HD Voice is here now. You can get it with Polycom business phones and a service provider like RealLinx that can provide the hosted PBX and carefully managed bandwidth to maintain high quality phone audio. Of course, this only works within an organization that is set up for HD Voice or among users that all have the G.722 Codec available. When one party is using traditional telephone technology, everything defaults to the universal G.711 telco standard and its limited frequency range.

Even so, higher fidelity within your organization can improve conversation intelligibility, including nuances in the voice that are often lost when talking on the phone rather than in person. This can be valuable when budgets and time restrictions reduce face to face meetings in favor of audio and video teleconferencing.

Are you ready to replace an aging phone system or order equipment for a new enterprise or new location? If so, why limit yourself to yesterday’s technology when you can have something that will provide a competitive edge at lower overall cost than you have now? Don’t make a move until you get pricing and features on HD Voice Hosted PBX VoIP telephone systems.