Best VoIP Providers For Business

Have you been thinking about making the move from multi-line analog or PRI trunk phone service to VoIP, but unsure about how well it will work? Here are some ideas and recommendations about what you can achieve and how to proceed successfully.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is also called “network voice” to distinguish it from traditional wireline phone service. The key word is “network.” VoIP is designed to run on computer networks rather than the proprietary telephone technologies we’ve been using for the last century. In fact, on the network, voice is just another service running along with data, video and streaming audio. Every service generates packets that are transported from source to destination using routers and switches on the network.

This presents a huge cost savings opportunity for larger businesses. Having one network to carry all traffic saves over having to maintain separate telephone and data networks. It’s less of an issue for smaller companies, although there are also cost savings in having one service provider connection instead of different telephone and broadband lines.

Where VoIP has gotten a dicey reputation is from using the Internet as both a telephone line and a broadband data service. The Internet wasn’t designed for high quality two-way voice conversations, so it’s a hit and miss proposition as to how good the voice quality of your conversations will be. Some calls may sound as good or better than the best analog line. Others will sound distorted and slightly delayed so that you and the other party cut off each other’s conversations. Residential users may not find this variable performance all that annoying, so they’re happy with the savings they get from dumping their analog landlines in favor of using their broadband Internet connection for both phone and computer service.

Business users who want clear conversations with their customers at all times have some better performing options available. Medium and larger companies will opt for a private line or MPLS network connection to their phone system provider. This is also called a SIP Trunk after the Session Initiation Protocol standard used for VoIP switching. A SIP trunk can support multiple simultaneous phone conversations, similar to an ISDN PRI trunk that is used with in-house PBX telephone systems.

Note that the type of VoIP service we’re talking about here is remotely hosted telephone switching at a service provider’s location. This is also known as Hosted VoIP, Hosted PBX, or communications in the cloud.

Small companies can also benefit from Hosted PBX service even if they have only a few to a few dozen telephones. In this case, the SIP Trunking provider supplies your business with an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that uses the SIP trunk to deliver both telephone and broadband Internet service. Unlike residential broadband phone service, the SIP trunk keeps the voice and data packets from interfering with each other. That maintains your voice quality on telephone calls. The phones have priority. Any bandwidth they are not using is automatically assigned as broadband Internet bandwidth. With some providers, you may also elect to plug existing analog phones into the IAD. This is called an analog handoff.

Another service that can provide both Internet and telephone service is Cable business broadband and telephone bundled service. You have one line coming into your office in the form of a coaxial cable. This cable carries telephone, broadband Internet and even television. Quality of service is maintained by keeping the telephone, television and Internet services in their own channels on the cable. Your phone service is VoIP technology, but your phone calls never touch the Internet. They just ride their own channel of the cable to a switching system that connects to the public telephone system. Note that to make this work, you need to get both your business broadband and phone service from the same Cable provider, like Comcast.

Are you interested in learning more about the advanced features and quality of service protections for VoIP service? Get features and pricing from the best VoIP providers for business telephone service now.

Why NOT to Buy a New PBX

For decades, the standard answer to a failing business phone system or one that had run out of capacity was to install a new PBX in a process known as a “fork lift upgrade.” A new PBX is something like a new car. You get higher performance, greater reliability and more capacity. So now that you are in the market for a shiny new PBX or IP PBX, the best one to buy may be none at all.

What? You mean hang on to that old junker that’s almost impossible to keep running? No, not at all. Don’t go out and spend a thousand dollars or much more on yet another PBX box. Instead, look at a hosted PBX solution.

Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP or PBX in the cloud, is a service rather than a product. You simply remove your old PBX and don’t put anything in its place.

Oh, then what do the phones plug into?

The phones will plug into your computer network. Nearly every company has a LAN with Ethernet jacks for each desk and office. You are used to having two separate networks in your company. One for the telephones and one for the computers. A hosted solution is based on a converged voice and data network, which is the Ethernet LAN that you have now. Larger companies have long ago converged their voice and data networks to take advantage of enterprise VoIP solutions. Small and medium size businesses can do the same. What’s important in a converged network is that voice packets have priority over data packets so that phone call quality is maintained regardless of the load on the network.

Clearly, you can’t just plug your old telephones into the LAN. The connectors are different sizes. That’s for good reason. Standard analog telephone equipment is completely incompatible with computer networking standards. There are two ways to resolve this. Either put network adaptors on each phone or replace the phones with newer IP phones that already have standard network interface cards built-in. You’ll probably want to use IP phones because they support more features over the network.

What do the phone lines connect to? There won’t be any outside lines connecting to your building like there are now. In other words, no analog business lines and no ISDN PRI. All the outside lines are connected to the hosted PBX at the service provider. You connect to that service provider using a line called a SIP Trunk. This can be a T1 line or Ethernet over Copper configured for SIP Trunking service.

I should mention that SIP Trunking can be setup to support your current analog telephones and wiring directly. In this case, the provider installs a piece of equipment called an IAD or Integrated Access Device. The IAD splits the SIP Trunk into telephone lines and broadband Internet service. In other words, it supports the two separate networks that you have now.

The whole reason you installed a PBX in the first place was to gain control of your internal calls and manage the sharing of multiple outside lines. The hosted PBX does the same thing from afar. Your internal calls stay on the network so that you don’t pay for office to office calls. Outside calls connect to the public telephone network at the cloud service provider.

A hosted PBX does some tricks that your old PBX doesn’t. You can have offices in many different cities all on the same phone system. You can also have local phone numbers in cities where you have customers but no physical office. Callers may dial a local number in Bangor, Maine and you’ll answer it in Phoenix, Arizona.

A major advantage of hosted telephone services is that you don’t have to come up with large amounts of capital to purchase a PBX system nor hire the staff to maintain it. That’s all handled for you by the service provider. They buy a much larger PBX system and have the staff available around the clock to maintain it and handle any problems that arise. You pay by the month for service, which often includes unlimited local and national calling plus a wealth of features to make office operations efficient. Some providers even include the IP phones in your service plan.

Are you getting ready for a telephone system upgrade? Don’t go out for a bank loan yet. Instead, get a quote for cloud hosted PBX telephone service and see if paying by the seat per month rather than making a big investment makes more sense for your business.

SIP Trunking and Internet On a T1

Lots of smaller companies have T1 lines for dedicated Internet access. They installed these lines after frustration with consumer-grade broadband options didn’t perform well enough or were unavailable due to location. T1 gives them highly reliable, rock solid bandwidth at prices that have declined steadily over the years. They love their T1 lines. What they may be unaware of, however, is that they could be getting both broadband and telephone service over that same T1 line.

Traditional T1 line service comes in a number of flavors. The original implementation for the telephone industry consists of 24 channels of digitized telephone service on two pair of twisted copper phone wires. A device called a channel bank converts the multiplexed digital signal to and from 24 individual analog business phone lines.

A more popular version of the T1 telephone line is called ISDN PRI. It’s very popular with companies that have their own in-house PBX telephone system. With ISDN PRI, you get 23 outside lines plus a switching and data channel that speeds up connections and provides Caller ID for the phones.

Yet another implementation of T1 is the T1 data line. This version supplies point to point data connections between business locations or dedicated Internet access. The bandwidth is 1.5 Mbps for a single T1 line, but multiple lines can be bonded together to increase bandwidth to as high as 10 or 12 Mbps.

Most companies have a T1 line for data or Internet access plus separate telephone service, or one T1 for broadband Internet and a separate ISDN PRI to run the phone system. Smaller companies don’t get involved with multiple T1 lines because they only have a few office phones and don’t need 23 outside lines. They simply pay one phone bill for the number of business lines they have and a separate bill for their T1 service.

An option that may work just as well and save small businesses money is to have both the telephone service and Internet broadband on the very same T1 line. A conventional T1 line isn't intended to do this. It is set up to work as a telephone trunk line or a high speed data line. The configurations aren’t interchangeable. However, there is another flavor of T1 service that does provide the dual function of voice with data.

The traditional name for this service is Integrated T1. The latest offerings are called SIP trunking or SIP trunking with Internet.

What’s the difference? Actually, they are more alike than different. The way it works is that the service provider installs a device called an IAD or Integrated Access Device at each end of the T1 line. This device combines voice and data by converting them to a common protocol, which happens to be IP packets. Once in packet format, the IAD can manage line bandwidth to ensure that voice packets have priority over data packets so that telephone call quality is maintained no matter what sort of Internet activity is taking place.

Line bandwidth is shared. If there are no calls in progress, all 1.5 Mbps is used for broadband Internet. When a phone is picked up, bandwidth for that call, typically 90 Kbps or less, is reserved for that call. The rest is still used for the Internet. Note that the phone calls don’t actually go over the Internet. They simply share the T1 line connection to the service provider. The more calls that are simultaneous in progress, the more bandwidth is reserved for voice packets and the bandwidth for Internet access is proportionally reduced.

This process is sometimes called dynamic T1 or dynamic line service to reflect that the proportioning between voice and data is handled automatically. So, where does SIP trunking come in?

SIP is the switching protocol for VoIP phones. SIP trunking is a process of providing public phone system lines to a VoIP telephone system using the native Session Initiation Protocol. A SIP trunk will connect directly to your IP PBX for IP phones. It can also be configured to offer an analog handoff so you can use the analog business phones you have now.

What’s exciting about SIP Trunking and Internet on a T1 line is that it can often be less expensive than buying a T1 line and phone service separately. One company that specializes in this product is Vocal IP Networx. They can save you money by providing a single telecom bill each month at a cost that may well be less than what you pay now for the same quality of service.

Do you suspect that you might save money by consolidating your telephone and Internet service with one provider? If so, get competitive pricing for SIP Trunking and Internet on a T1 line and similar services and see if this option makes sense for you.

Business Broadband and Phone Comparison

Small and medium size businesses have a need for both broadband Internet access and business telephone service. Years ago, the answer was easy. Order a broadband service from an Internet Service Provider and then go visit the telephone company and order your business phone lines. These are still viable options, but today you have much more to choose from.

Most smaller businesses have limited bandwidth requirements, a fairly small collection of phones and very limited budgets. What often makes the most sense is a bundled service that includes both telephone and broadband service from the same provider. There are two primary bundled services that both offer a cost savings compared to buying your phone and Internet service separately.

The first is the integrated product known as Integrated T1 service or SIP Trunking. They both use the same technique of line sharing but differ in the connection method. Depending on your location, you may get a T1 line or an Ethernet line service.

Integrated services are based on the principle that one incoming line is cheaper than two. Unlike consumer broadband phone services that combine voice and data packets willy-nilly, Integrated T1 and SIP trunks use integrated access devices at each end to keep the voice and data separate. Both give priority to voice packets. When someone picks up a phone or answers a ringing line, the bandwidth to support that phone call is reserved for the duration of the call. When the phone hangs up, that bandwidth is released to the pool.

What’s is the bandwidth pool? That’s what’s used for your broadband Internet service. Let’s say you have an integrated T1 lines and no phones are in use. The full line bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps is used for broadband access. If nobody is using the Internet, say in the middle of the night, that line just runs idle.

The flip side of the coin is when you have a dozen phones in use. Those consume half the bandwidth of the T1 line. Your broadband speed sags to 750 Kbps, which can be no trouble at all for smaller companies using the Internet for credit card verification, email, Web browsing and online ordering.

SIP trunking works like Integrated T1 in that both manage the line bandwidth and prioritize telephone calls over Internet access. That way your phone quality is maintained and the variations in broadband bandwidth may not even be noticeable. If they are, you are simply trying to do to much with too small a service. T1 lines can be bonded and Ethernet based SIP Trunks offer a wide range of bandwidths to speed things up.

You might think that SIP trunking implies a VoIP phone system. Actually, you can configure the handoff to your internal phones to be analog, SIP based VoIP or ISDN PRI for a PBX telephone system. Similar handoff options are available for Integrated T1 lines.

A competitor to the integrated services of Integrated T1 and SIP trunking is Cable broadband. The Cable systems is organized differently, with everything assigned to channels. That’s because TV stations have always had assigned channels. Now there are channels on the Cable system that carry stations that have no over the air presence. Other channels can be assigned to carry broadband Internet or telephone calls.

The channelization of cable maintains the separation of voice, data and video so that they don’t interfere. You can order telephone and business broadband from your Cable provider. You can also include TV if you have the type of business with a public waiting room, like a auto service center or doctor’s office.

Which option is best for your company? Compare business broadband and phone options for pricing, features and availability to make the best decision for your particular needs.