Now VoIP is Spelled C-L-O-U-D

By: John Shepler

When VoIP telephony first appeared on the scene, it looked distinctly like a different way to make a phone line. In fact, a lot of the motivation in switching technologies was based on trying to avoid long distance toll charges on the PSTN. We’ve come a long way from Analog Telephone Adaptors (ATA) to IP PBX. The next big migration is away from in-house VoIP systems and out to the cloud. It’s a migration that could easily turn into a stampede.

The Need For Speed
What’s driving the continuing innovation in VoIP technology? It’s all part of the business reorientation away from ownership. The “great recession” exacerbated a trend that was already underway. Business wants and needs to be nimble. Timelines that used to be measured in years are now months. This is especially true for seasonal businesses, but can affect everybody. Why do you want to be stuck with assets that are too much or too little for what you need right now? Why, indeed, when you have to option to match resources to needs on the fly?

Nimble is the Cloud
That’s the promise of the cloud. As one tenant among many at a datacenter with seemingly unlimited resources, you can quickly scale up and down as needed. It’s unlikely that your needs will tax the system or leave it sitting idle. If the providers are doing their jobs, there will be plenty of capacity for everyone and enough in reserve to handle unexpected requirements.

Contrast that with running your own data center in-house. Running out of capacity? You better get to work preparing the justification and requests for more capital. Then get the equipment and software ordered, installed and on-line… before external events bring your business to its knees. That’s weeks, months and sometimes years.

Much easier just to make a phone call or, better yet, log-in to your online control panel and activate or deactivate resources. An unexpected flood of orders is cause for celebration instead of panic when you can respond instantly. Business fall off a cliff? No need to be stuck paying for idle capital when you can be rid of it and its unjustified expense in a moment.

Why Do You Really Need a Phone System?
The obvious reason to have a business phone system is for critical communications among employees, customers and vendors. Actually, that’s the reason to have the phone function. You don’t really need to have the system yourself.

The telephony cloud solution is called Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. All that “big iron”, as these systems are lovingly referred to, go out the door. They are replaced by cloud services that take care of call switching and connections to the public telephone system. How that’s done is invisible to you. Your phones work the way they should and you don’t have to deal with having to maintain a morass of wiring and rack equipment.

You also don’t have to cough up the capital needed to purchase a premises telephone switching system or replace one that has reached its capacity limit or useful life. Adding or removing phone from a hosted system is almost trivial. You’ll always have exactly the right level of resources to meet today’s needs. You also have the peace of mind that comes from knowing if things change tomorrow, you can easily accommodate the new situation.

The Technology Advantage
Another promise of VoIP technology is that phone networks become more like computer networks. In fact, there is generally one network that serves both phones and computing equipment. Building phones with little computers inside expands the possible functions they can do and make it easy to integrate them with desktop computers for combined operations. That’s especially valuable for call center operations.

The cloud hosted phone system also may have the capability to integrate mobile phones as well as the hardwired variety. Few in-house PBX systems can do that. In the end, you want employees to be able to do their jobs whether they are at their desks, out in the field, in a hotel room or anywhere else. That’s something technology can accomplish today… but you can’t do it with yesterday’s gear.

Are You Missing Out?
The telephone cloud has developed so rapidly that many companies aren’t even aware of the capability that’s out there and how cost effective it can be. Could you benefit from a hosted VoIP phone solution ? You might be able to sooner than you think.

Packet Voice Moves to the Cloud

Many businesses and individuals have already switched to VoIP for their telephone service. The original impetus is a cost savings over legacy phone service. Beyond that, enterprise VoIP services offer the opportunity for reduced staff and maintenance coupled with a richer feature set. Just when you thought that VoIP was a settled technology, a new wrinkle comes along. That’s VoIP up in the cloud.

Why move your phone service to a cloud? Let’s take a look at why this might be advantageous to your company and how we got from the old-timey candlestick and desk sets to something as amorphous as a cloud.

A generic technical term for VoIP technology is packet voice. Packets are a computer network protocol most often associated with Ethernet. A packet is a self-contained piece of data that has all the information needed to get it from source to destination. Packets are packets. It doesn’t matter what’s inside. Packets can carry voice, images, video, data and whatever else you can reduce to binary digits.

The major technical leap in packet voice is changing from a switched circuit telephone network to a packet switched network. Switched circuit means that every telephone call has an electrical circuit set up to connect the two (or more) phone sets involved in the conversation. This is unique to the public telephone system and has been that way since its inception. All telephone activity was originally voice calls made between electrically passive telephone sets. Look at one of those old phones. Do you see an AC cord? No way. The electrical power for the call was supplied by batteries at the telephone switching center.

When computer networks became more prevalent than telephone networks, the idea of what a network is changed dramatically. Both telephone and computer networks can run over twisted pair copper wire equally well. What’s different is that computer networks don’t set up and tear down electrical circuits every time that one piece of equipment wants to exchange data with another. The circuits that connect each computer device are continuous. What is switched is the data packets themselves. Ethernet switches or routers ensure that packets get to their intended destinations without having to create new circuit connections on the fly just for a single or group of packets.

Here’s why that’s important. VoIP or packet voice is transported over computer networks rather than switched circuit telephone networks that are only used for telephones. By connecting the phone to the LAN, you can eliminate the separate telephone network. All that wiring and the personnel needed to maintain it and change connections as phones are moved, added or deleted goes away. The cost of running the telephone network also goes away.

Something much larger doesn’t go away. That’s the switching system needed to interconnect telephones, even those using packets, and connect to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for outside lines. That specialized switching system is most often called a Public Branch Exchange or PBX. Small businesses with few phones and outside lines may use a simpler system called KTS or Key Telephone System. Those are the phones with individual line lights that tell you if a particular phone line is being used or available for your call. Medium and larger companies have the more automated PBX equipment that manages both internal calls and multiple outside lines.

This is where the cloud comes in. An in-house PBX system can be set up to work with legacy analog phones (switched circuit) or the newer IP telephones used for VoIP. You can connect the phones and PBX to your computer network to eliminate the separate telephone wiring, but you still have to make connections to the public phone network if you want to take or make outside calls. PBX systems aren’t cheap, either. They require a major investment, ongoing maintenance efforts and the likelihood that you’ll have to replace the one you have when it goes obsolete or runs out of capacity.

Why not move that PBX to the cloud the same way that you move servers from in-house to the cloud? That’s the idea behind Hosted PBX, also called Hosted VoIP. The hosting is done by a very large packet voice switching system located at a cloud service provider. You don’t have to buy this system, maintain it or worry about upgrades and obsolescence. That’s the job of the cloud service provider. You simply pay a monthly fee for each phone or “seat” that you need.

Ironically, this concept takes us back to the early days of telephony when there was a large central switching system that connected to each telephone. The difference between the old “Ma Bell” approach and Hosted VoIP is that you are no longer tied to the single phone company that owns the phone wires. You can order network connections called SIP trunks to connect to any cloud provider you want. VoIP technology also allows new applications that integrate telephones and computers, important for call centers and contact centers.

Packet network technology has enabled computers to network within companies and all over the world. This technology is now being used to transmit video conferences and telephone calls on the Internet and private network connections. The rise of cloud computing companies takes packet switching equipment to the next level by moving the central hardware to the cloud, where it can be managed by specialized service providers. The advantage to you is lower costs and more features.

Are you wondering whether your business telephone system is optimum for your current requirements? Why not explore other options that include VoIP, SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX services? Get pricing and features for competing enterprise grade VoIP services to compare with your current setup.

Best VoIP Providers For Business

VoIP has been transforming the telecom industry for years now. As a business owner or manager you may be wondering if you are missing out on something important by sticking with your tried and true analog telephone service. Does VoIP really work? Can it really save a business money?

Yes, indeed, VoIP technology is for real. It is sometimes called “network voice,” a term that describes what the technology is all about. The idea is that your company computer network can carry telephone conversations as an application if they are compatible with other network equipment. This is possible when telephones are turned into network peripherals called IP telephones or SIP telephones.

This sounds like a clever tech trick, but just where does the cost savings come in? For VoIP to make any difference, you need to be able to get rid of your old telephone wiring, PBX system and analog lines. Then the phones and the computers share the remaining company LAN and broadband connection to the outside world.

Here’s where it gets tricky. All VoIP isn’t the same. Voice and data packets might look similar, but they have very different needs. Voice is a real time streaming service. Anything that interferes with the smooth and continuous transfer of packets from one phone to another without delay is going to make the conversation sound crummy. Network congestion, latency and packet loss that doesn’t faze data transfers will destroy phone calls. There is no plug-and-play for VoIP. The network, including any outside telecom lines, have to be specially set up to support voice services or they won’t work very well.

The best VoIP providers take measures to insure that your phone service works as well as it does now or even better. In general, this means that you need a private line connecting you to your service provider. That line must be specially conditioned so that voice packets have priority over data packets. You won’t notice fractions of a second delays in data downloads, but you sure will if they affect the phone calls. Voice needs a guarantee of bandwidth, latency, jitter and congestion so it can work perfectly.

For most companies, the ideal approach is to let your VoIP service provider also be your bandwidth provider... at least for any lines transporting VoIP phone calls. This way you can be sure that those lines will be optimized for best VoIP performance. This is especially important for smaller companies that will save money by using a single integrated T1 line or SIP trunk to provide both dedicated Internet access and VoIP telephone service.

Larger companies may have dedicated SIP trunks that transport only phone conversations. Like ISDN PRI, each SIP trunk can transport a certain number of calls within its bandwidth capacity. How many simultaneous calls depend on the CODEC (Coder/Decoder) that does the conversion between analog and digital. The universal standard is G.711 which is the same standard used in T1 telephone and ISDN PRI. Other codecs offer HD voice that is more understandable than standard telephone audio or they use less bandwidth to cram more conversations per trunk. Be careful here, though, the lowest bandwidth CODECS gain their efficiency at the expense of voice quality.

Perhaps the most popular business VoIP service right now is called hosted VoIP, hosted PBX or telephony in the cloud. You have only SIP telephones in-house. All switching and connections to outside lines is done at the service provider. Cost savings of 60% or more are being promoted for this type of service.

There are other arrangements you may also be interested in. Some VoIP companies offer an “analog handoff” so you can use regular telephone sets with VoIP service. You don’t get as many features with this hybrid arrangement, but you may save the cost of upgrading all your phones and wiring. Note: Some VoIP providers may include new SIP phones with your service agreement to sweeten the deal. That can make the upgrade well worth your while.

Still other VoIP providers work with your in-house PBX telephone system and only replace the trunk lines that would otherwise go to the local telephone company or competitive carrier. If you are happy with your current phone system but just want the opportunity to save on your monthly phone bill, this can be a good solution. When it comes time to replace or upgrade your PBX, you can review the situation and see if going with a hosted PBX makes more sense than paying for a new system.

Even if you only have a single telephone or a few desk phones in your company, you may be able to save substantially with service from one of the best VoIP providers for business. Get competitive quotes and features now.

Benefit From The Great CAPEX to OPEX Migration

There’s a great migration underway as we speak. This isn’t a physical movement of people or animals, it’s a change in the way business does business. The migration is from a CAPEX or capital expense model to an OPEX or operational expense model. If you haven’t been swept up yet, you might think that this is something pretty subtle as movements go. It’s actually a major turning point that will eventually encompass every business, including yours.

All businesses have both capital and operational expenses. The operational kind are what it takes to keep the business running day to day. Your utilities are operational expenses. So are your office supplies. So are your salaries and wages.

Capital expenses are your investments for the future. If you go out and buy a building, that’s a capital expense. So are major pieces of equipment. Your in-house PBX telephone system is a capital expense and one that may soon become an operational expense instead.

What characterizes a capital expense is that it involves a large sum of money that is plunked down to acquire the asset. You derive the benefit of that asset over the years and may wind up paying for it over the years. Another approach is to go to the bank and extract some of your savings or take out a loan so that you can pay for the asset up-front.

Either way, your money is tied up for a long period of time regardless of how well your business is doing. Your cost is the same in lean times or boom times. You can hire or lay off employees. It has no effect on your capital items unless you decide to sell some off or acquire more.

What’s more, many capital expenses have operational expenses that accompany them. That new data center requires people to run it and additional cost for electricity. There are maintenance and upgrade costs to keep your asset up to date and functioning at peak efficiency.

All of this suggests that capital expenses are something of a gamble. You do your best trade studies to make sure you are buying the right thing, sized correctly to support your current and expected level of business. If you guess wrong, you either have to buy another one or rip out the one you bought and replace it with something that suites your changed requirements.

The last decade of rampant volatility has convinced many businesses that they need to be far more agile in riding the waves of business activity. One technology that is making this more possible for all size businesses is the cloud. The “cloud” is shorthand for any service that is performed remotely by a specialized service provider and purchased on a pay as you go basis. Many cloud services are priced by the “seat” or user by the month.

There are two advantages to this cost model. First, your costs vary with your level of activity. When times are lean, you cut back and use fewer services. You pay less each month. When business picks up, you use more services and add more “seats” as you add more employees. You pay more, but the increased income from your increased business activity covers this. At no time do you run to the bank to withdraw savings or take out a loan. The cloud is the epitome of OPEX.

What kind of services are available in the cloud? Certainly your computing services, including anything you would run in a data center yourself plus security for your networks. Also, your telephone system. Remember the expensive PBX acquisition? That’s gone for good with Hosted PBX services. Your phones work the same as they always did, probably with more features, but you only pay per phone per month. Sometimes the phones themselves are included, obsoleting any need for CAPEX at all.

Should you be joining the migration from CAPEX to OPEX, at least where technology is concerned? Find out the range of cloud services and pricing available for your business needs. Then see if it still makes sense to continue with capital expenditures.

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.

What Is VoIP For Business?

There’s a lot of buzz these days about the advantages of converting from traditional telephone services to VoIP. There are, indeed, major advantages for businesses to go with enterprise VoIP solutions. However, there are some pitfalls to avoid if you want to make the transition successfully. First, though, let’s take a closer look at just what VoIP is and how it differs from the phone service you have now.

One confusing aspect of VoIP is the name itself. The term VoIP is an acronym for Voice over Internet Protocol. The thing that jumps right off the page at you is the term “Internet.” It immediately conjures up visions of broadband phone solutions that piggyback on top of Cable broadband or DSL connections. That is, indeed, VOICE going OVER the INTERNET. It’s also one example of VoIP. However, it is far from the complete story.

The idea behind broadband phone is that with the right equipment you can use your broadband Internet service to connect you to a competitive phone company. The whole impetus for this is that the local telephone company, called the ILEC for Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, pretty much owns you for local phone service. It’s easy to switch long distance providers, but much harder to change local services. Why? Because the ILEC owns the copper wires between your location, business or residential, and the switching equipment in their office. You can’t dig up the wires and move them elsewhere, so you need an alternative “phone line.” The Internet provides just such an alternative connection.

One of the major pitfalls of broadband phone is that the Internet was designed for transporting data reliably, not for transmitting voice quickly. Everything on the Internet is transported in packets. That includes data bits representing digitized phone conversations, video clips, websites, email and many other things. What they have in common is a standardized packet structure called IP or Internet Protocol.

Now, here’s where the trouble comes in. The Internet treats one packet just like the next. It doesn’t matter if they are zipping along smoothly or all clogged up. The system is set up to get each packet from Point A to Point B sooner or later. Having data correct is much more important than having it as soon as possible. If a packet gets lost or corrupted, another protocol called TCP or Transmission Control Protocol sees that the packet never arrived at its destination and retransmits it. As a user, this is all invisible. All you know is that your email or web page displayed correctly.

Voice differs from data in that it is a real time protocol. A voice packet that shows up late is of no use because the conversation has already moved on. VoIP is set up to discard missing or out of sequence packets. A few here and there won’t make a difference, but a lot of missing packets will punch holes in the conversation and make it hard to understand.

Video is equally sensitive or even more so. The way video stays intact is to have the packets go to a staging area before they are displayed on the screen. This area is the buffer. Buffering collects packets however they come in and then feeds them out smoothly to create a continuous picture stream. Buffering also works for audio and is used for Internet radio stations extensively. That way any congestion on the net won’t cause the audio to drop out.

Buffering could be used for VoIP, but not very much or it will create havoc. The tradeoff is that phone conversations are two-way. The buffer will cause a big delay from the time you start talking until the other person hears it. Buffering and other delays show up as something called latency which turns two way conversations into more like walkie talkie conversations. Only one person can talk at a time and you have to wait before taking your turn.

What’s better? Bypass the Internet and use a private line connection called a SIP Trunk. SIP is the switching and signaling protocol for VoIP telephony. The SIP Trunk is carefully engineered to give voice packets priority over data packets and to have enough bandwidth to avoid congestion that causes latency and jitter.

SIP Trunks connect your company to your business VoIP service provider. The provider takes care of all outside lines to the public phone system. You can connect the PBX phone system you have now using a SIP Trunk or use an IP PBX that uses IP telephones rather than standard analog phones. Even more interesting is hosted VoIP, which eliminates the in-house PBX system completely. The service provider gives you both lower rates to use the public telephone system and takes care of switching both inside and outside calls.

As you can see, there are various flavors of VoIP phone service available today. You want to be careful to pick a solution that not only saves you money but has the features and voice quality you need to conduct business effectively. Enterprise VoIP providers have solutions for all size businesses at attractive prices. Compare features and costs now to discover what’s available for your particular locations.

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.

Hosted VoIP Solutions Include New Phones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IP Phones Are In Demand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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