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.

Should You Buy VoIP as a Service?

Software as a Service (SaaS) has been around longer than people have been talking about “the cloud.” Frankly, so has VoIP. What’s gaining steam now is a move by larger businesses to tie their multiple locations together via SIP Trunks and outsourcing the PBX function by businesses of all sizes. You might consider this approach VoIP as a Service.

Many residential and small business users embraced VoIP in the cloud as a way to save money by dropping their analog line in favor of letting their broadband Internet connection do double duty as both a high speed Internet connection and a phone line. A device called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor turns regular telephones into IP telephones so they can work on a computer network. This approach works, but the voice quality is highly variable. That’s because the Internet is mandated to treat all traffic equally. Unfortunately, this means that large data file or video downloads can congest the network and cause telephone calls to distort or drop.

There are a couple of ways to have both telephone and Internet service brought in on the same line. Cable companies do this by giving each service its own channel, along with the TV channels on the cable. TV channels don’t interfere with each other, so there is no reason that voice and data can’t also coexist as long as you keep them separated. To make this work, you need to get your business phone service from the cable company so they can manage the traffic.

Another method for delivering telephone and broadband service on the same line is the SIP Trunk. This is most often a T1 telecom line or Ethernet over Copper service running over twisted pair telco wiring. What makes it a SIP Trunk is Class of Service (CoS) enabled routers at both ends of the line. Voice packets automatically get priority with all other traffic using the remaining bandwidth. SIP Trunks are available where cable doesn’t go. You also get dedicated rather than shared Internet access for bandwidth that doesn’t vary depending on other users.

Larger SIP Trunks can be set up to interconnect multiple business locations for both voice and data traffic. If you have several branch offices, you probably already have private lines connecting them. Why not include your in-house telephone traffic and avoid paying telephone toll charges for calls to remote offices? The SIP Trunk will do that. It can be set up for multiple CoS levels so that voice and video get highest priority, mission critical data is next in line, Internet access is lower still and background activities like remote backup get whatever is leftover.

Some medium and large companies can benefit from SIP session consolidation. The way this works is that all the branch offices are connected via headquarters to the service provider using a large SIP trunk. The company pays for each channel or session that supports one call. Since the sessions are shared among all users in the company, there is no need to have dedicated separate trunks at each location with excess capacity going to waste.

The question that remains is whether you should continue to operate your own in-house PBX switching system or opt for a hosted PBX. The hosted option moves the PBX into the cloud, where it handles all of your internal and outside traffic. This is the ultimate in VoIP as a Service. You typically pay so much per seat per month. You can add more seats when you need them, as the cloud PBX has all the capacity you’ll ever use. No need to add extra capacity now. You simply pay for what you actually use. Some hosted VoIP providers will even include new IP phones in your monthly service fee so you don’t have to make any capital investment at all.

Does VoIP as a Service make sense for your company? Find out by getting competitive pricing and features for SIP Trunking and Hosted PBX telephone services for business.

Business Phone Goes Hosted

Business telephone service has expanded over the years, from the single line analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) to multi-line PBX systems that handle hundreds and thousands of phone sets. What’s the next logical development? Could it be even larger and more sophisticated in-house PBX systems? No, just the opposite. The PBX is moving out as business phone service goes hosted.

Hosted business phone is another term for telephone switching in the cloud. Hosted means that a service provider hosts your telephone service on their equipment. The responsibility for running the PBX system and providing the lines to the public telephone system are effectively transferred from your company to your service provider’s.

Why would you want to go the hosted route? It generally boils down to finances and flexibility. The first financial advantage is that you no longer have to buy expensive capital equipment and provide a space for it in your building. This is seldom a one time allocation. Every so many years you find that your equipment has become obsolete and too expensive to maintain or it can no longer keep up with the demands placed on it. You need a newer and likely larger system to replace it. That process is called a “fork lift upgrade” because it you can’t often salvage any of the existing equipment. A fork lift truck drives in and hauls out the old PBX system. It then drives back in to deliver the new replacement.

Granted, smaller PBX systems that support branch offices or retail locations may be something you can pick up and carry yourself. Even so, the “fork lift” metaphor applies. It’s out with the old and in with the new. Hopefully you can pay off the old system before it’s time to replace it.

With a hosted PBX system, there are phones but there is no PBX or telephone switching system in-house. That lets you avoid a major capital expense and also the guessing game of trying to predict how much capacity you’ll need during the lifetime of that system. If you guess low, you’ll be replacing it while it still works just fine. If you guess high, you’ll pay for capacity that you never use. Either way, it’s hard to know the future well enough to pick just the right size PBX.

The other financial advantage is that PBX phone systems cost more than just the purchase price. Every time to you to do a “move, add or change” with your telephones, somebody has to do some rewiring and change some programming in the system. That could be a dedicated staff member who is the telephone manager full or part time. Otherwise it is a contractor known as a VAR for Value Added Reseller. Either way, there’s ongoing expense to run the system and keep up with the changes.

How do hosted business phone systems save you all that grief and expense? The service provider has a much larger shared PBX system and the staff to run it 24/7. They keep up with day to day maintenance and upgrades. Because this system is so large, it can accommodate many customers and easily expand to meet your changing needs. That’s the principle behind the cloud. You don’t have to worry about all the hardware, software and personnel needed to keep the phone system running. The service provider specializes in this and handles it for you.

What’s available in the way of hosted phone services? There are a number of cloud communications providers who offer this capability. They generally provide the service on a “per seat” per month basis. Each phone has internal, local and long distance switching capability included. Most of the time its a single price for all calling other than international and for all the features. Some providers can include your mobile phones so that they are part of the PBX capabilities. Some providers even include the physical phones. These are IP Telephones than plug right into your company LAN. You connect to the provider with a network connection called a SIP Trunk.

Can hosted business phone make sense for your company? There are solutions for every business from the smallest retailer to the largest corporation. Get prices and features for competing hosted PBX service providers now and see if you can save both money and effort.