ShoreTel Connect CLOUD Goes Way Beyond VoIP

By: John Shepler

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Telephone Trunks for Call Centers

By: John Shepler

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hosted PBX Adds Video Services

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concentric Cloud Solutions Virtualizes Your Business

You’ve been hearing a lot about virtualization recently and are wondering if it could be the answer to your unpredictable business costs. The only problem is that you don’t know quite where to start. It seems like there’s a lot to know before you can start deploying virtualized anything. Relax. Concentric will take care of that for you.

Virtualization started out in the local data center but it’s now moved to the cloud. The whole idea behind virtualization is that you can get higher performance out of a hardware infrastructure by making one server look like many servers and a cluster of small servers look like a super computer.

Why not just pair off software applications and computers? That’s the way we’ve done it for generations, ever since the days of ENIAC. It certainly works but it’s inefficient. As loads vary, you may be using only a portion of a server or have is so overloaded that you really need two. It takes so long to order new equipment, get it mounted and spun up, that you can’t respond quickly to changing needs. In order to get reliability, you wind up over-provisioning hardware. Then a big unexpected surge of activity comes in and you crash.

Virtualization separates server functionality from server hardware. You may have a dozen servers running on a single physical machine. You may have one server running over a dozen machines. All the magic is done in software, so changes can be made almost instantly.

This is the secret of the cloud. Racks and racks full of physical servers can be sliced and diced into virtual servers provisioned with a few keystrokes. Disk farms become virtualized storage. If one company is the sole user of all this, it’s called a private cloud. If many customers can share the same resources without interference, it’s called a public cloud. The owner and operator of the public cloud has just one job. That is to keep the cloud running no matter what happens. Each tenant needs to feel like they are the only one in the cloud no matter how many clients there really are.

If you do it right, you can move your back office infrastructure to the cloud. That’s what Concentric Cloud Solutions is offering businesses as an alternative to in-house IT and Telecom facilities. Services include Enterprise Cloud that offers on-demand cloud computing on a pay as you go or monthly prepaid plan. Cloud Storage complements cloud computing by making storage sharing and management of files and data available in the cloud. Managed Services offer a private cloud environment for companies that still want dedicated servers but don’t want to make the investment in-house. Smaller companies can benefit from Cloud Hosting to support websites, email and domains.

Content providers have special needs when it comes to getting their products to their customers. Concentric Acceleration Services address these needs for digital media, online content, mobile and web-based applications. Content Caching accelerates deliver of static web content that is repeatedly downloaded. Application Acceleration does the same for dynamic content you find on information portals, e-commerce apps and social media. Video content, such as webcasts and movies, is improved by Video Streaming Content Acceleration.

Cloud Voice Services address “your other network.” Telephony has occupied its own proprietary space until recently. Now the trend is converged voice and data networks to get to one network for everything. The next step is moving the voice support infrastructure to the cloud just like you do data servers. Concentric offers a Cloud Contact Center so you can establish virtual contact centers that free agents to work from anywhere. Pricing is pay as you go. Interactive Voice Response, Intelligent Call Routing, Conferencing and Concentric Connect create a suite of services that make communications in the cloud the sensible way to go.

Are you facing another round of capital investment to upgrade an aging or inadequate infrastructure? Don’t sign any loan applications until you first take a look a virtualized cloud-based solutions for voice and data. You’ll have greater flexibility and minimal investment with pay as you go solutions.

Is HPBX Your Next PBX?

It’s almost back to the future, to coin a phrase. Companies nationwide are getting rid of their phone switching equipment and going back to service providers, what we used to call telephone companies. Only the phones and the telephone trunk lines remain. Is technology reversing itself or is there something new going on here?

Make no mistake about it, telephony today is different from the telephone service of yesteryear. But there are similarities, too. What companies have found is that building and maintaining little telephone companies in-house entails a lot more cost and bother than you might expect. If that’s true, though, why did they ever leave good old Ma Bell in the first place?

One problem with business phone service versus what you have in your home is that there are lots and lots of phones. If you only have one or two lines, you probably have just one or two phones. It’s likely that each phone is tied to a particular phone line. Perhaps you have multi-line phones where each line has a switch or “key” so you can select it. Some small offices have only a single phone set one one line and use a second line to connect a FAX machine or credit card terminal.

So what’s the problem with having so many phones? It’s pretty likely that by the time you have a few dozen phones, your office facilities are so spread out that people can’t lean over to the next desk and have a conversation. They either have to get up and walk down the hall or make a phone call. If each phone has its own line, then those calls will go through the phone company and you’ll likely pay a charge. If you want to talk to someone in a branch office in another state, you’re surely going to pay long distance charges.

What companies really wanted was something of an intercom feature, where they could just dial a few digits and get to another phone in-house. To accomplish that, they bought PBX or Private Branch eXchange equipment. The PBX is the device that connects phones and also managed outside lines as needed. All the phones connect to the PBX and the PBX connects to the phone company, but only for calls leaving the premises.

The local telephone companies offer a service called Centrex (Central Office Exchange) to compete with the PBX. The switching equipment is kept at the central office, like always, but the system functioned more like a PBX. The Centrex system based on the individual copper pair from each phone to the CO is now being replaced by HPBX or Hosted PBX service.

What’s different about HPBX is that it is a VoIP phone system. Communication is over a WAN network connection called a SIP Trunk. This frees the user from being tied to a particular local phone company by those ubiquitous twisted copper pair. Now any service provider anywhere in the world can be your phone company as long as you can get a digital connection between their facilities and yours. What you need in-house is IP phones, also called SIP telephones, connected to your converged voice and data network. Your service provider hosts the PBX switching function with termination to the public switched telephone network as needed.

Are you ready for a phone system upgrade or merely concerned that what you are doing now costs more than it could? Get competitive quotes for hosted PBX telephone systems, some of which include new phones as part of the service fee.

When More Bandwidth Doesn’t Help

You’re probably familiar with this scenario. You’ve had a T1 line or DS3 bandwidth circuit for years. Everything ran just fine until recently. Now, all of a sudden, the Internet just crawls and your new VoIP telephone system sounds like calls from the far side of the moon. Employees are peeved because they can’t get anything done. Customers are livid because they can’t even carry on a civil conversation over the phone. Management is getting hot under the collar. Better get more bandwidth on order, right?

Maybe. It’s entirely possible that you’ll call up your provider and double your dedicated Internet bandwidth only to find out that you still have the same problems and now you’re paying twice as much. Talk about adding insult to injury! What’s gone wrong here and what can you do to really fix it?

The problem is that we visualize broadband connections like water pipes. You can just see that traffic flowing smoothly through the pipe. Applications demand more capacity and the flow increases, just like opening a faucet wider. Obviously, the only way you’ll hit the limit on capacity is when you fully open all the faucets at once. Then each application, the lawn sprinkler, the shower, the dishwasher and the wash basin each get less than they would like.

The fix seems equally obvious. Just put in bigger pipes with higher capacity. The water meter will spin a lot faster, but now you can support a lot more users full-on and nobody will suffer a reduction in flow. The telecom equivalent of a bigger pipe is what is called in the industry a “bigger pipe.” That means a line with more Mbps or Gbps. The analogy is clear. Just order a bigger pipe and your troubles will be over. Or will they?

The snag in all of this is that network traffic isn’t homogenous like water. One water droplet may be just like the next. One Ethernet packet may be not at all like the next. Some applications, like file transfers, just brute force move packets from one place to another. Others, like video conferencing or VoIP telephony are highly sensitive to latency, jitter, lost packets and packets arriving out of sequence. If your network gets congested, the file transfer will work fine. It will just take a little longer. Get in the same situation with real-time applications and they’ll crumble in the battle for packet transfers.

So why not just increase bandwidth when business grows to the point where more users are trying to do more things simultaneously? It’s likely that at some point you’ll have to do just that. But also know that simply adding more capacity may not make a big difference. Why? It’s because some applications will take as much bandwidth as you give them regardless of what they really need. If you simply double the bandwidth, Web pages may load a little faster, files might move a little faster, but the telephone and video may still break up mid-conversation.

There probably is some line speed that is so fast that everything will work at the same time with no problems. That might be 10x or even 100x what you have now. You’ll pay a fortune just to have enough capacity at hand to support rare moments when everyone is on the phone and watching YouTube videos at the same time the system is doing full backups. Is that really necessary?

No. Not at all. What you really need is a way to prioritize traffic so that preference is given to real-time two-way streams that are extremely sensitive to network congestion. You need to establish CoS or Class of Service controls that carve out a certain capacity to meet the needs of your VoIP phone system and video conferencing system and then divvy up the rest among lower priority processes. You can go further to push time insensitive file transfers and backups into the background so that they won’t interfere with anyone working online.

That solution is called the converged network. It’s more than just plugging everything into the same LAN and WAN. You need Class of Service both on your LAN and on the WAN. Techniques for the LAN are well established. The WAN is another matter if you are using the Internet for access to your VoIP provider. The Internet strips off those CoS tags in the name of network neutrality. One solution is to use a SIP Trunk to connect to a single provider for VoIP and Internet broadband so that CoS can be maintained on that link. Another is to keep the broadband you have, but use a separate point to point connection to your VoIP provider.

MPLS networks can maintain CoS among multiple business locations. You may be using Internet VPN connections to make those multiple connections, but with limited success if voice or video are involved.

Another interesting option is the “intelligent bandwidth” approach being offered by Telnes, a major competitive carrier. They’ve developed a technique called IP Priority Class of Service to maintain CoS on an Internet circuit using managed routers. This recognizes that most of the congestion issues occur on the link between you and the core of the Internet. By cleaning up that connection, real time applications, such as hosted VoIP, can run much more smoothly that they will on uncontrolled Internet broadband services.

Are you suffering slowdowns, application breakage and poor telephone voice quality? You may need more bandwidth or you may just need better bandwidth management. Before you go out and spend a bundle to no avail, get a complementary telecom engineering consultation from Telnes and other competitive service providers and review your options. You may be able to get results for a fraction of what you thought you had to spend.

SIP Trunking Providers Want Your Bandwidth

The telephone industry is changing. Not long ago, the standard setup for most companies was an in-house PBX system managing dozens, hundreds or thousands of phones. For outside calls, the most cost effective approach has been to bring in ISDN PRI trunk lines with 23 local and/or long distance lines each. Even small companies chose key telephone systems that can handle two to six outside lines. Those setups are changing fast.

There are two strong trends in the industry right now. One is cloud based hosted PBX telephone and the other is SIP trunking. They work perfectly together, but you can also have SIP trunking without cloud services.

A telephone trunk is a number of telephone lines all bundled together. This can be a wire bundle, such as a multi-line copper cable. It can also be an electrical bundle on a single line. ISDN PRI trunks, for instance, bundle 23 separate phone lines plus Caller ID and switching on a single T1 line. A SIP trunk is a telephone trunk line designed specifically to work with IP phones in VoIP telephone systems. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching technology used in VoIP in lieu of SS7, which is used in traditional switched circuit telephony.

So, why are SIP trunks such a hot item right now? It’s because a SIP trunk can be connected directly to your network or IP PBX to bring in multiple lines from your VoIP carrier. On a converged local area network, you are already running SIP. Why go to the trouble to converting to another protocol just to gain access to the public telephone network?

SIP trunks are also how you connect to a hosted PBX system as a cloud service. Companies are rapidly discovering that the per-seat cost of a cloud based telephone service is less than they pay now when you count the personnel, operating and maintenance costs of an in-house phone system. With hosted PBX, you no longer have to invest in new hardware every few years and your system is always being maintained and upgraded by the service provider.

It stands to reason that SIP trunking providers want your telephone business, but why do they want your bandwidth?

The reason that your carrier wants to provide you with both telephone lines and Internet bandwidth is so they can guarantee the quality of your phone calls. With traditional telephony, the telephone and computer networks are kept completely separate and cannot possibly interfere with each other. One of the cost saving advantages of enterprise VoIP solutions is that they use the corporate data network for everything. To make that work, you need to prioritize voice packets so that your phone conversations don’t distort or break up no matter what the computers are doing.

When your SIP trunking provider delivers both telephone and Internet service on your trunk line, they prioritize packets using CoS or Class of Service tags. These tags tell all equipment that recognizes them how to handle different types of traffic to ensure service quality. Not all bandwidth providers do this, so if you mix various line services you can wind up undoing your carefully engineered network quality.

There’s also a cost advantage, especially for small businesses who get both telephone and broadband on one line instead of two. You don’t even need IP phones to take advantage of this service. The provider will install an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that can connect to conventional analog phones and your broadband router.

Now that you know why SIP Trunking providers want your bandwidth, why not find out what sort of deal they’ll make to get it? Request competitive quotes for telephone trunking, dedicated Internet access and cloud hosted PBX services now.

SMB Phone System Needs Only Phones

Anyone who wrestles with programming and maintaining an in-house phone system occasionally longs for the days when you just plugged in the phone, lifted the receiver and there was dial tone. Those days have returned with the rise of cloud communications systems.

The magic is in moving the complicated switching equipment to a service provider who keeps it up to date, well maintained and easily expanded when your needs change. The name of this service is Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. The hosted part means that someone else provides the bulk of the telephone system and the connectivity to the public switched telephone network. What you have in-house is the telephones.

These aren’t just any phones. They are IP phones designed to connect to computer networks rather than plugging into a phone outlet. The electrical signals are completely different, but then so are the connectors. That little RJ-11 telephone plug? It’s been replaced by a fatter RJ-45 plug. Does it look familiar? That’s because this is the same connector used by most computer equipment. In fact, your telephone has become a networked device, just like a PC or printer.

In a typical hosted VoIP system, you have a converged voice and data network that connects to both your telephones and other computer equipment. There are no separate telephone wires. Convergence is the process of making sure that one network can handle the very different requirements of data and voice. Phone conversations are very sensitive to network limitations such as latency, jitter and congestion that don’t bother data transfers or Internet access.

Does that mean that there is a problem with having broadband Internet access on the same network with your telephones? Not necessarily. In fact, the best enterprise VoIP solutions have voice, video, Internet, file transfers and other processes running simultaneously without conflict. The trick is engineering QoS or Quality of Service into the network so that different classes of packets don’t interfere. Just plugging everything into the LAN and hoping for the best is going to cause problems.

One trick in making VoIP work for business is to keep the telephone service off the Internet but allow the two to co-exist otherwise. Why? Because the Internet is great for data connections and one-way downloads of media such as audio and video. It’s the instantaneous two-way nature of phone conversations that can get compromised on a network designed for one way transfers that take whatever time is required to ensure every packet is sent and received correctly.

There’s a service of special interest to small and medium size businesses called SIP Trunking. A SIP trunk is the broadband connection between you and your service provider. This is a private line connection that is engineered to carry both phone service and broadband Internet. The two share the line but don’t Interfere. They are split at the service provider’s end, with the phone lines going to the hosted PBX and the broadband routed to the Internet.

Would you like to have only telephones to deal with in your business and leave management of the telephone system to someone else? If so, then it pays to look into Hosted VoIP Solutions to get the features you want without the cost and complexity of an in-house phone system.

XO Nails Down SIP Trunking Savings

How would you like to save over $88,000 a year for your business just by switching to SIP trunking service?

Not so fast, you with the pushcart. To save this kind of money, you have to have the size of operation that spends that kind of money. I’m getting the number from the new Enterprise SIP Savings Estimator offered by XO Communications, a major competitive voice and data carrier.



What kind of business saves the big bucks? In this case, one with 1,000 employees located in 10 locations and making half their phone calls within the company. This is not at all unusual for Fortune 500 corporations. In fact, I’ll bet there are many companies in your city that meet this criteria. Perhaps you even work at one. If you are in charge of information technology or telecommunications, this is something that can make you a corporate hero. With nearly all businesses turning over every rock to find cost reductions, SIP services are well worth investigating.

What’s special about SIP and how does it work the savings magic? SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching protocol behind most VoIP implementations. In fact, when you hear the term SIP, you can bet the discussion involves VoIP telephony to some degree. The selling point of enterprise-level VoIP phone systems is that they are big money savers. But the question remains, “how?”

One big source of savings comes from the fact that we are in the digital age and companies large enough to have multiple business locations have those locations tied together with a WAN or Wide Area Network. Some do this with T1 lines and their own proprietary network topology. Others use a private cloud network, once Frame Relay and now MPLS, to create a mesh network that ties all locations together.

But what about telephone? The local PBX telephone system dominates with analog or ISDN PRI trunk lines for outgoing calls. Here’s where the savings come in. Right now you may need to use the public telephone network to make a call from a branch office to the main office or another branch. You pay for each of those calls. But, if you can press you data network to do double duty and transport voice as well as data, you can keep those internal phone calls on your own network and pay no toll charges at all. It’s almost free, since the data network has to be in place anyway.

SIP trunking is a technique that carries both voice and data on the same network. You don’t even need to connect your phone system to the public network. You can install a SIP trunk to a service provider that handles that at lower cost that you may be paying. The SIP trunking provider can also give you broadband Internet service over the same trunk without computer traffic interfering with voice traffic.

Oh, but you need to be a major corporation to save using SIP services, right? No, not at all. Most medium size companies and many small companies can also save money with SIP trunking in place of the separate phone lines and broadband services they buy now. How can you know if it makes sense for your operation? Easy. Get a competitive quote for SIP Trunking services and see just what the cost savings are. You may be surprised at what you’ve been missing out on.

Why Managed MPLS Networking Services

Let’s say your company has offices located all across the country. Each location has its own private local area network , perhaps supporting computer networking, IP telephony, and video conferencing. As stand-alone facilities, things work great. But your enterprise is more than just a collection of geographically dispersed sites. It is an organization with a common mission and processes.

You decided long ago that you needed to integrate your network facilities to unify the company. There are big efficiency improvements to be gained by not having to support every function at every location. When employees across the country are electronically just as close as those down the hall, you can establish centers of excellence and marshal short term support when there are local overloads.

There’s also the opportunity to avoid toll charges on internal telephone calls when you put your phone system on your own network. That can amount to an enormous cost savings when there is regular communication between sites. Only when you need to go off net, or on to the public switched telephone system, do you pay for local telco lines and, perhaps, toll charges. You can decide whether it makes more sense to have local access at each location or consolidate your lines with ISDN PRI service or SIP trunking.

The trick becomes how to interconnect those far flung business sites. Most companies start out with dedicated point to point T1 lines and move up to faster services, such as Ethernet, DS3 or OC3, as the traffic levels increase. What gets lost in incrementally adding line after line is the opportunity to save cost on WAN network bandwidth. One day you find yourself with a huge portfolio of telecom line charges plus a considerable staff to manage your ad-hoc WAN network.

What’s better? Today’s answer is managed MPLS networking services. MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching is a “cloud” network designed specifically to link multiple locations with specific connections or in a fully meshed network. What characterizes a fully converged MPLS network is scalable bandwidth, privacy of connections, high reliability with fast response when issues do arise, a service footprint that covers all of your locations, and quality of service controls that ensure high performance for time sensitive applications like enterprise VoIP and real-time two-way video conferencing or telepresence.

That sounds like a tall order, but there are a number of top carriers who specialize in offering private networking services with nationwide footprints. It is even possible to include overseas offices through traffic exchange with carriers in foreign countries. Each of your sites is connected to the cloud through an appropriately sized dedicated access connection. From there the network operator programs your connections into the tag servers that manage network traffic. Even though your share the cloud with other customers, your bandwidth is guaranteed and your connections are private. For the ultimate in security, you can choose to encrypt your data during transit.

By turning your WAN network operations over to a MPLS networking carrier, you unload the burden of constant monitoring and network management, but you’ll also likely realize a significant cost savings. Will quality of service suffer? On the contrary, a top tier carrier has more resources at their disposal than you can afford to manage a nationwide network 24/7. They’ll also have far more bandwidth in their core network than makes sense for any single enterprise. That means you can grow your resources to match the growth in your business without incurring extensive construction delays every time you want to increase throughput between locations.

How do you find these high performance network providers? The best way is to go through a telecommunications broker who has a complete suite of carriers available to bid on your business. You can then feel confident that you are getting the best service at the best price, without having to develop the expertise and staff a group to search the industry. That’s all taken care of quickly and easily. How quickly and easily? Take literally a minute to enter an inquiry for managed MPLS networking services and an expert Telarus consultant will be at your service in no time at all.

VoIP Comparison Shopping

There's no doubt that VoIP or Voice over IP telephony is the hot new thing in residential and business phone service. Like all new technologies, advancements are rapid and new companies with better offers spring up right and left. So if you are dissatisfied with your current service or want to find the best deal you can get for switching to VoIP, how do you choose? Do you just go for what's advertised on TV, see what you can find searching online, or what? How about a comparison shopping service that makes it easy to see what's available and pick the best service for your needs? Does that sound like a good idea?

You bet it is. Fortunately just such a comparison shopping tool has become available and is free to use online. You can try it right now at Affordable VoIP. Go ahead, it will open in a new window and you can still read the rest of this guide.

The Affordable VoIP guide is aimed at residential and small to medium size businesses who need anywhere from a single line phone service to a virtual office with numerous extensions, but don't want the expense and hassle of running their own telephone system. If you have a corporate office or call center with your own PBX and a support team, you'll be interested in ISDN PRI and SIP Trunks at reduced prices. If you don't know what that means, Affordable VoIP is right for you.

Let's take a look at how the search function works. At the VoIP comparison shopping page, go ahead and select the Plan Type as "Business". If you call internationally, select the most frequent country you call. Otherwise don't touch that selection. Let's pick United Kingdom, just to see what we get. Now check any optional additional information you want considered, such as No Activation Fee, Adapter/Router included, and Digital Phone included. I'll select Adapter/Router included because I want to use my existing phone.

Click the Search button and you'll get results within a couple of seconds. I count 17 plans from 4 different vendors that meet these requirements. The cheapest is a FAX only extension for $9.99 a month. Most plans are in the $25 to $50 a month range, but with differing features. How do you choose? First thing to do is let your mouse hover over linked name of the service provider. You'll see a short description of what that particular plan includes. Click on the link or magnifying glass next to it and You'll be taken to a vendor specific page that offers complete details.

Note also that you can sort by column on this results page. I was interested in the rate to the United Kingdom, so I'll click on that column heading to sort by price from low to high. The lowest cost plan that offers calling to the U.K is Phone Power Freedom Business Unlimited package that charges just 1 cent per minute. The others offer a rate of 3 cents per minute. Wow, compared to conventional telephony these international rates sure are low!

You can also sort on the other column headings, which are Service Provider, Plan Name, Monthly Cost, Activation Fee, and Regular Minutes. If you find a plan you want, just click on the Order Now link and you'll be taken to the vendor's order page. At the bottom of the chart there is also a link to change your search criteria if you want to try other options. You can sit and play with this all night, if you want. That's a lot easier that trying to contact each company and make notes on their plans to compare prices and options.

You can choose to select residential instead of business plans. The system works the same, but there tend to me more vendors serving the residential marketplace and the monthly costs tend to be lower. You do retain the option to include a favorite overseas destination in your search. Once again, the rates you'll find seem to be eye-poppingly low with VoIP services.

That's all there is to it. This tool is available 24/7 and gives you near-instant results on a comparison chart of services, costs and features. Give the Affordable VoIP comparison shopping tool a try and see how much it can help you find the best deal on broadband phone service for your home or office.

T-1 Digital Phone Lines For PBX Systems

Most business telephone systems that have more than a few outside lines now use T-1 trunk lines to connect from your building to the local telephone office. Why? Because the value in consolidating many individual phone lines into a single or a couple of T-1 lines makes digital lines more cost effective than a collection of analog phone lines. This is true regardless of whether your in-house phone system uses analog or digital phones. Even most VoIP based phone systems terminate calls in T-1 telephone lines.

Very simple one and two line phones or key telephone systems with 4 to 6 outside lines are set up for analog phone lines. The simple VoIP services use an analog phone adapter to connect to DSL broadband service to provide 1 or 2 lines. That's pretty much the extent of what you can do with these simple systems. Once you get more than a half-dozen outside phone lines, you should be looking at T-1 service as a cost saver.

There are several flavors of T-1 line services to be aware of. A standard T-1 telephone trunk offers up to 24 individual phone lines all digitized and multiplexed into two pair of copper wires that connect back to the telco central office. Your PBX system needs a T-1 interface card to connect to a T-1 line. These are pretty much a standard option for any new PBX phone system and you can likely order a plug-in T-1 card for older systems.

A variation on the T-1 line is called an ISDN PRI or T-1 PRI phone line. PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface and it's part of the ISDN or Integrated Services Digital Network specifications. A regular channelized T-1 line and a T-1 PRI line are pretty much the same animal, with one important difference. PRI lines offer 23 rather than 24 phone lines and use the remaining channel to provide signaling and data. You need a PRI line if you want Caller ID for your phones.

Another variation is called T-1 Integrated service. Integrated means that the line carries both telephone calls and Internet data. That's right, you can split a T-1 line so that you can have a dozen outside phone lines plus broadband Internet service coming in on the same line. This is quite a cost saver for most small businesses that need both phone and reliable Internet service. Some of these Integrated services are called dynamic T-1 lines because they automatically assign all the bandwidth not needed for active phone calls to the Internet service.

What about VoIP phone systems? Most Enterprise VoIP phone systems use IP telephony within the company so that the phones can connect to the IP PBX system using standard Ethernet cabling. Many use the same LAN as the company's computers to save on wiring costs. All the in-house calls go from phone to phone over the network. But outside calls still have to connect or terminate to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Most often that interface is within the IP PBX system or voice gateway. The most common phone line interface is the T-1 or T-1 PRI digital phone line, just like conventional PBX systems.

Another option that's not quite as widely deployed is to connect your phones to a VoIP service provider in IP format directly from your network. The service provider takes care of terminating calls to the PSTN. The network connection from your company to the service provider is called a SIP Trunk and is most often a type of T-1 line set up to be unchannelized to transport voice packets.

You should know that T-1 line prices are lower now than they've ever been. If you're still using analog phone lines connected to your PBX telephone system, it may well be worth your while to convert to one or more T-1 or T-1 PRI lines. If you already have T-1 service, then you should get a competitive quote to see how much you might save on your next contract. Simply enter a quick online quote request at T1 Rex.