Best Way to Manage Your Phone System: Get Rid of It

By: John Shepler

What is a common denominator for all businesses? Telephones. What’s a common denominator among business phone systems? They need to be managed. Well, what if they didn’t? Would that be a load off your mind and a competitive edge for your business? It certainly could be. Let’s see why. Even more importantly, let’s see how.

The Trouble With Desk Sets
The legacy business phone is a heavy black box full of analog circuitry and connected to the phone company its own telephone “line”. Today, the phones are lighter, some have digital circuitry, others are cordless with multiple handsets. They still have their own unique “telephone” network wiring.

When you have a single phone or a cordless set with several handsets, managing the phone system is no big deal. There’s really nothing to manage. If you’ve got a dial tone, you’re good to make and receive calls. The one thing you might add is a backup battery if the phone has an AC power adaptor. Legacy analog sets get their power right from the phone line. Newer electronic phones, especially the cordless variety, have DC power supplies that plug into the wall.

Management headaches begin when you get a number of phones sharing outside lines. Sure, each phone can have its own outside line, but that gets real expensive real fast. Plus, not everybody is making outside calls at the same time. Some are calling within the company. Many are not on the phone at all.

Types of Business Phone Systems
The two most popular types of business phone systems are Key Telephone Systems (KTS) and Private Branch Exchange (PBX).

Key systems let you call between phones inside the company using only your internal telephone wiring. That’s a big advantage over independent phones because the telephone company will charge you for every call that has to go through their network. The limitation of KTS is that each line has its own button on every phone and has to be manually selected to make or receive calls. That limits the practical number of outside lines to typically 4 or 6.

Private Branch Exchanges are little phone company switches within your business. You can still make internal calls through the PBX without using an outside line. The PBX system manages a pool of outside lines that are shared among all the phones in the system. The number of lines you need depends on what percentage of employees are making or taking calls from outside the company at the same time. A dozen lines can often serve dozens of users.

Why Get Rid of Your Phone System
Someone in the company, and it may be you, is responsible for telephone expenses. These include local and long distance charges, the cost of purchasing and maintaining the phone system, plus moves, adds and changes to your telephone assets.

The cost of “moves, adds and changes” comes from the fact that each phone has a dedicated line that goes to the KTS or PBX. The connection tells the system which phone is picked up or needs to ring. If you want to move a phone to another desk, you have to also move the connection in the phone wiring or reprogram the system so that it knows the new location. Otherwise employees have to change phone numbers every time they are relocated. Add a phone? You’ll need to add a phone jack at that location and a line back to the system.

The larger the company, the more phones there are, the more phone wiring there is to wrangle and the more expensive the phone system becomes. Worse, if your company grows beyond the capacity of your system, you’ll have to upgrade it if possible or rip it out and put in a new one if not. At some point the technology will become obsolete and it will get really pricey or impossible to keep the beast running. Then you are looking at a major capital investment.

How to Get Out of the Phone Business
Whatever business you are in, it is probably not the telephone business. You simply need those phones to get your job done. Even call centers are focused on the services being provided and not the telephone equipment itself.

What if you could just buy or rent the telephone sets as you need them, plug them into your existing computer network and let somebody else worry about buying and maintaining all that expensive switching equipment?

You can with a service called Hosted PBX or Hosted VoIP. Both mean the same thing. VoIP is the technology that turns telephone sets into network peripherals. Like all computers, the phones have their own internal address on the network. They can be plugged into any network jack and will work just fine. No need to change any wiring.

There is no KTS or PBX on your premises. A much larger “Cloud” system is located at the service provider’s data center. All you have on-site are telephone sets called SIP Phones and a special router or call controller to direct phone calls to the provider. You no longer need outside lines to the phone company. Instead, you have a digital SIP Trunk that connects your location to the provider.

The Pay as You Go Advantage
What’s happened is that you have traded a large initial investment in a phone system and the ongoing costs to maintain it and make changes for a simple “cost per seat” for each phone. Some providers include all new SIP phones when you sign up for service. They’ll send more when you expand the business. No need to pay up-front for phones and lines that will sit unused until you need them. If you need to downsize at some point, you return the phones and stop paying for the ones you no longer need.

Advanced Features
Chances are that your existing business phone system doesn’t have the ability to include smartphones or integrate with computers for efficient call center operations. You many not even have the functionality to support auto attendants or hunt groups for multiple agents for your call center. The hosted system will not only have many more advanced features that what you probably have now, but will be kept up to date as new features are offered. You never have to upgrade your phone “system” because the system is provided for you in the cloud.

Are you feeling limited by the functionality, inflexibility or high costs of your current phone system. Before paying a small fortune to upgrade your in-house equipment, take a closer look at Cloud Hosted PBX Business Telephone Service.

What Dynamic CoS Means to You

By: John Shepler

Most of today’s networks are converged networks. In other words, they carry a variety of traffic from disk backups, file transfers, cloud access, VoIP telephony, audio streaming, video conferencing & streaming and web services. With all of that going on, how do you ensure that your networks maintain the integrity of every process?

The Need for QoS
A network is more than a “dumb pipe” when Quality of Service (QoS) controls are implemented. What do you need that for? Can’t you just provide enough bandwidth so that every packet can traverse the network without limitation?

You certainly can if your pockets are deep enough. 10 Gbps? 100 Gbps? 1 Tbs? There is some bandwidth level short of infinite that will carry any traffic you throw at it with ease. Unfortunately, such capacity gets very expensive very fast. On a local network, you may find that even the fiber you have isn’t enough. When ordering MAN and WAN bandwidth, the cost can make your eyes bug out.

Different Applications, Different Requirements
This is where quality of service controls come into play. Not every file transfer needs to take place in a fraction of a second. Nobody expects those overnight backups to get done in minutes. Your emails need to get to their destinations, but not instantly. Even video downloads are expected to take some amount of time, considering their size.

What we do insist on is telephone conversations that don’t break up or make each party wait a second before responding. We wan’t video conferencing that doesn’t look jerky and responses from cloud software that don’t hesitate, especially long and random pauses.

The truth is that not all packets need equal treatment. Some need to get right through the network as quickly as possible. Others can wait a second. Still others can get through when they get through… within reason.

CoS to Implement QoS
What’s needed is traffic control that decides how your network capacity is allocated among all the packets that want it at any given time. Implementing this process is called Quality of Service. The mechanism that does that is called Class of Service (CoS).

Class of Service is a numerical tag that is inserted in the Ethernet header. There are three bits assigned for this, giving 8 possible classes from 0 to 7. Most of the time you won’t need this many. A few different classes will keep the insensitive traffic from damaging the highly time sensitive traffic.

Chances are that you have CoS tags implemented on your local network now. This is especially true if you’ve made the transition from analog telephones to SIP phones for VoIP. Phone conversations and huge file transfers don’t play well together… unless they’re kept separate.

Think of CoS as lane assignments on a superhighway. Voice packets go on the high occupancy lane. Cloud traffic gets the fast lane and data backups go in the slow lane on the right. CoS tags determine which lane a packet gets to use.

The Next Step: Dynamic CoS
As conditions change, you may wish to alter the class assignments. Local IT people can implement these changes on your network. The WAN is another matter. Legacy procedures for making changes tend to involve paperwork and delays of even weeks for implementations.

tw telecom has implemented something called Dynamic CoS that allows you as the customer to prioritize your applications dynamically and in real-time. Along with dynamic bandwidth control, it gives you, the user, wide ranging control of WAN network resources, as if they were your own.

Are you in need of more flexible bandwidth services that can respond to rapid changes in business requirements? You may well benefit from newer intelligent and dynamic network services. Find out what MAN and WAN network services are available that meet your requirements.

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

Cloud Based Unified Communications

Servers in the cloud are now commonly accepted. Many IT organizations are finding it makes more sense to have nearly instant access to nearly unlimited processing and storage than be constantly trying to figure out how much hardware to order for next year. You have a problem either way. Guess too low and you run out of capacity when unexpected business comes your way. Guess too high and you are saddled with expensive resources that sit there idle, using power but not doing much else. It’s a good thing that you don’t have these problems with the phone system. Or do you?

In a way, your PBX switching system can be thought of as just another server. Chances are that it is a proprietary design that only the vendor supports. It’s also deals with IO (Input/Output) that is unique to the telephone industry. Just how scalable is this system? Probably not much. You start out ordering as much capacity as you can anticipate and most of it sits idle awaiting the business to grow into in. At some point you run out of capacity and no more phones or lines can be connected. For awhile, you can work around these limitations by ordering additional interface boards. Then the whole design goes obsolete and you start all over.

How would you like to get rid of this headache and greatly expand your voice communications options? As you might suspect, the answer is in the cloud. With cloud based communications, all switching and message storage is done on cloud based servers. You simply need a user access device known as a SIP telephone or IP Phone. These devices piggyback on your data network can connect to the cloud using a specialized WAN connection called a SIP Trunk. Out goes all that phone wiring as well as the old clunker PBX and the expense of maintaining it and periodically buying a newer model. The cloud keeps all the hardware and software up to date.

Need more capacity? Just bring it online the way you order up more cloud servers. In this case, the capacity is measured in terms of “seats.” One seat is one telephone. You need more phones? Order additional seats as required. You pay for these per seat per month. Many times the price you pay is a fixed amount that includes your domestic local and long distance calling plus a plethora of features.

Speaking of features, cloud based PBX or hosted PBX systems can do tricks that your old in-house PBX hardware can’t. For instance, much of today’s business communication is done on smartphones. PBX equipment doesn’t know what to do with a smartphone. There’s no wire to plug it into a port on the machine. So, what you wind up with is a stand-alone office phone and a separate smartphone with its own features on its own network. If you spend a lot of time in the field, you’ll need to call into your desk phone voice mail from time to time just to see if there are any important messages. Well, at least when you’re in the office you can have both your desk phone and smart phone at hand.

Wouldn’t you rather have one number for clients to call and let the system sort out where to send it? That’s the idea behind unified communications. Instead of having all sorts of different ways that you communicate, each with their own device and connectivity, you integrate everything into one system that can handle it all. This can include traditional landline telephones plus wireless smartphones, but it can also include video conferencing, text messaging, email and FAX. What all of these have in common is that they are all network communications that are integrated on your own network. The SIP trunk connects your network to your provider’s network and vast cloud resources.

One provider, the global communications company Masergy, has expanded the role of cloud based unified communications to include CRM system integration, call accounting, call recording, automated attendants, hunt groups and call center features. Your access is by telephone, video phone, desktop computer, mobile device, laptop computer and business systems. They’re all connected to the cloud, making it possible to connect across diverse platforms. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you are doing. You always have access to the same calling features and applications.

Have you just about reached the end of the “line” with your old in-house PBX phone system? Before you invest a fortune in a newer model and perpetuate the same old frustrations, consider a move to cloud based unified communications. You’ll probably find that you can get more productivity at less cost by switching to the latest cloud communications services.

Cloud Hosted IP PBX For Features and Cost Savings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Does a VoIP Call Work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cloud Computing For Disaster Recovery

It’s been quite a year for natural disasters. Fires scorching thousands of acres at a time, rivers overflowing their banks, torrential rainfall, tornadoes everywhere. Are you feeling a little nervous that your business could be taken out at any time?

Sadly, an unfortunate twist of fate can hit anyone at any time. You probably already have some protections in place, such as property insurance, tape or disk file backups and maybe even offsite storage of important files. Ask yourself this, however. How will you get your business back running immediately after a catastrophic local disaster?

While having copies of critical documents and customer files may prevent you from going out of business permanently if disaster strikes, they aren’t enough to keep you running without a hiccup. For that you need backup infrastructure as well as files. A generation ago, that meant duplicate data centers that were located far apart. The idea is that the kind of disaster that wipes out your facilities is unlikely to hit two geographically separated areas simultaneously. If you are prone to earthquakes, one data center can be local but the other must be in an earthquake free zone. The same thing applies to hurricanes. If you are on the coast, your backup must be far inland.

Today’s disaster recovery solution of choice is the cloud. With infrastructure, platform and software as a service, you can do anything in the cloud that you would do in-house. The advantage is that the cloud is often far, far away.

Why choose a cloud solution over doing it all yourself? Avoidance of enormous capital investment is a very good reason. It’s not hard to spend millions creating the environmentally controlled and secure facilities with robust backup power and multiple diverse bandwidth connections, not to mention the racks and racks of equipment inside. This is one reason why many businesses decide that regular system backups are good enough. If the worst happens, they’ll simply get an insurance settlement and order replacement equipment. Oh? How long will that take? Just what is your income stream going to look line in the ensuing days, weeks or months?

One advantage of the cloud is that it scales fast. You could decide to have a minimal cloud solution implemented right now for the monthly fee it takes for storage and limited server capacity. If you get knocked out where are, you can log-into the cloud from wherever you can get a broadband connection and scale up in minutes or hours. When the crises is over, you can back off from all the virtual servers and go into a standby mode.

By the way, that cloud storage makes an excellent backup for your local files. Cloud storage is robust and almost infinitely scalable. This alone can be the justification for having a backup operation in the cloud.

What if you are in the cloud already? It’s not unknown for cloud systems to suffer outages just like anything else technical. In this case you may want to have a minimal backup system locally, in a colocation facility or set up as a private cloud in a different data center.

Hosted PBX phone systems can also keep you running after a disaster, almost like nothing ever happened. At least that’s the way your customers will perceive. it. You only need a network bandwidth connection and a few SIP phones to get your calls and voicemail. Being a network voice system, those SIP phones can be located just about anywhere... even somewhere else in the country.

Are you apprehensive that your business may not be protected from shutdown as much as you’d like? It may not be that expensive to have backup computing and telephone service in the cloud. Check options and prices now and rest easier that you have a recovery solution.

Ethernet Service Providers Offer Cost Savings

One technological revolution quietly underway is the transition from circuit switched to packet switch WAN protocols. Many businesses first become aware that something is happening when they go to get price quotes for bandwidth upgrades or new line services. They expect to be buying a T1 line and find themselves ordering Ethernet over Copper instead. Why is this and what can you get for your bandwidth dollar these days?

The shifting ground of the telecom industry is being driven by a move to all-IP networks. The root cause is that computing devices, such as PCs, web servers, wireless access points, tablets, smartphones, telepresence, and IP PBX systems are generating network traffic that far exceeds traditional telephony. I included IP PBX in that group because an enterprise VoIP system with SIP phones connects via the LAN and uses Ethernet packets, not analog or proprietary digital signals. In most businesses, the common denominators are the LAN and the telephone network, with the phone network on the way out.

We’re now at a point where the crying need is to connect LANs together and to the Internet. We’ve been doing that with traditional telephone technologies such as T-Carrier and SONET for decades. If you were designing a comprehensive networking approach, would you pick one technology for the LAN and something completely different for metro and long haul networks? Wouldn’t you try to have a common protocol that runs everywhere for efficiency and ease of connection?

That’s what’s behind the rise of Carrier Ethernet. As more competitive carriers enter the market and older networks are upgraded, IP core networks are becoming more and more the rule. These are high speed fiber optic networks that have regional, national or even international service footprints. The last link in the chain is appropriately called the last mile connection. This is the wireline, fiber or wireless link that connects you to the service provider point of presence.

Ethernet services are available at every level of networking, from simple Internet access through international MPLS networks that link hundreds or thousands of sites. Most companies will want some type of dedicated Internet access. A 2x2 Mbps or 3x3 Mbps Ethernet over Copper line is a direct competitor to T1, at about the same price. It’s not uncommon to get twice the bandwidth for the same cost by choosing Ethernet rather than T-Carrier T1 or T3.

Ethernet is also more scalable than other telecom services. Typical bandwidth options include 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50, 75 and 100 Mbps. Other increments between these levels may also be available, depending on the carrier. Those are just Ethernet over Copper offerings. Ethernet over Fiber takes you to 250, 500, 750 and 1,000 Mbps or up to 10 GigE.

You may want to install Ethernet Private Line or Ethernet Virtual Private Line service for a point to point connection between two business connections, like headquarters and a branch office. This replaces T1 or DS3 private line service at a better price.

One service that Ethernet offers, that you won’t find with traditional point to point connections is E-LAN or Ethernet LAN Service. It connects multiple LANs in a mesh topology at the layer 2 level. This lets you build one giant LAN that includes all of your remote location LANs.

Would you like to expand your service options and save 50% or more on line pricing compared to what you have now? Get instant online Ethernet service pricing up to 1 Gbps now. More complex multi-site networks need a bit of manual work, but will be quoted promptly.

Why NOT to Buy a New PBX

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

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

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

Oh, then what do the phones plug into?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enterprise Cloud Communications Arrives

Cloud computing has been in the headlines as the next generation of information technology. What’s breaking out now is cloud communications, a move to make telephony as well as number crunching and file serving available as cloud services. You know it’s arrived when a provider the size of XO Communications launches an enterprise level cloud communications service.

In an odd way, what’s new is old. The origin of telephone services is in a cloud called the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Your basic phone is simply a client that derives its functionality from the massive telco switching network.

Then came in-house phone systems in the form of key telephone systems and PBX or Private Branch Exchange systems. These are essentially small phone companies that you own and maintain. All calls within the company stay on the internal system. It’s only when you need connectivity to the outside world that you have to rejoin the PSTN.

Telephone services are now moving back to the cloud, but with a difference. This time it's IP communications rather than switched circuits. It’s also not about a monolithic public network but private networking services with competitive features that go way beyond what the original telephone network was engineered to provide.

The new cloud communications offerings also go by the title of hosted PBX. The idea is that it is more efficient to establish a large IP switching center with a dedicated expert staff than for every business to be its own telephone company. The business users need only have the telephone handsets, speakerphone and similar desk equipment connected to their local networks. The large, expensive and hard to maintain switch moves out to the cloud.

Therein lies the key to cloud communications. It’s the rise of converged IP networks to handle voice, video and data, replacing separate dedicated networks for each. Once you’ve installed SIP phones on your LAN, it seems a bit inefficient to send that traffic to an in-house IP PBX system that connects to the PSTN with specialized analog and digital trunk lines. Why not keep all of the traffic on the converged network as long as possible?

That’s what XO says. They’ve built their business by creating an enormous fiber optic network footprint to provide digital connectivity to both businesses and other service providers. With an extensive converged network already in place, it’s logical for XO to add value by providing telephony solutions in their cloud. This way you have only one supplier for both network connectivity and the communication services running on that network.

The enterprise cloud communications model works especially well for companies with more than one business location. XO can tie your headquarters, regional offices and branches together as if they were in a single large facility. The converged WAN network give you all the standard calling features you expect in an enterprise telephone system plus high definition video conferencing and the ability to include mobile phones in a unified communications system. These communications services are priced on a per-seat-per-month basis.

Are you interested in upgrading your business communications while avoiding a massive capital investment? Look into future proofing your voice, data and video with hosted services in the cloud. Get pricing, features and availability on SMB and enterprise cloud communications services now.



Note: Photo of clouds and building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Microsoft is a Phone Company?

With all the recent buzz over the Android, we know that Google is getting into the telephone business big time. But did you know that Microsoft is also in the phone business? The enterprise phone business?

Microsoft Response Point is a software based PBX telephone system that is intended for small businesses with fewer than 50 employees. Like nearly every new PBX design, this one is based on VoIP telephony with SIP for switching control. So are larger enterprise VoIP solutions. But Microsoft has targeted Response Point to companies that are small enough that they probably don't have a dedicated IT or telecom department. These companies need solutions that are easy to set up and manage, and don't require all-day training seminars to teach employees how to use their strange new desk phones.

Wow! Microsoft could be my new phone company. I can hardly wait to run out and buy the Response Point software in the box next to the Vista upgrade.

Just kidding. Response Point is sure to cause you less grief than trying to get your old Windows XP machines to dance a Vista tune and not fall over. That's because YOU won't be trying to round up the right CPU and peripherals to roll your own phone system. Response Point comes embedded in ready-to-run small business phone systems, like the ones offered by Aastra.

The AastraLink RP phone system based on Microsoft Response Point consists of three components. They are a base unit, gateway, and special IP phones designed especially for Response Point systems.

The base unit - think PC or server - runs the Response Point software. This is the brains of the system can comes with a voice activated auto-attendant, voice to email integration and easy integration with Microsoft outlook. Microsoft outlook? Remember that SIP telephones run right on your company LAN along with your computer terminals. This is one of the big advantages of enterprise VoIP. Being packet network based, they easily integrate with computer systems. Easy, that is, compared with traditional telephone systems that have proprietary hardware and software and their own unique network architecture.

The AastraLink Gateway is the interface box that connects your IP PBX system to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Standard phone lines plug into the gateway. They are accessed as outside phone lines through the base unit connection to the gateway. Alternatively, you can buy SIP trunking telephone service from competitive carriers and not worry about connecting to the phone company yourself.

The SIP telephones, also called terminals, are the user interface to the IP PBX system. They look like standard business desk sets but are designed for easy interface to the system. No separate phone wiring is needed as they plug right into an Ethernet jack. Some, like the Aastra 57i, even have PoE or Power over Ethernet capability so that you don't need a separate power supply. A PoE phone is the network equivalent of the analog telephone that plugs into a phone jack without any other connections needed.

AastraLink's Response Point systems have the smarts built-in to make these phone systems pretty much plug and play. The system will auto-discover and auto-configure any new handsets plugged into the network. Moves, adds and changes become invisible, so you don't need a technician to come running whenever someone needs to relocate to a different desk.

How's your business phone system? Ready for an upgrade or launching a new office? Find business telephone system suppliers that can get you set up Aastra and other high quality telephone solutions at the right price.

TDM vs VoIP - Why Not Both?

Are you scratching your head over the great divide in enterprise telephony? Should you stay with your trusty TDM based PBX phone system or toss everything out in favor of VoIP? Stick with the tried and true and you fear that you may be missing out on services that could improve productivity. Scrap it all for a brand new VoIP solution and you may have a eye-popping capital expense to swallow. What to do?

Regardless of the impression you get from technical news reports and vendor ads, you have more options than you think. You don't have to make an all-or-nothing decision either way. You can decide whether to have analog, digital, or IP phones on each desk and whether to go with TDM or VoIP telephone services to connect with the outside world. Some systems will even allow you to mix and match. TDM? VoIP? Both? Why not?

Most any phone system that handles more than a few telephone handsets gives you an option on how to connect to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Perhaps you've accumulated analog phone lines to the point where you have a dozen or two plugged into FXO (Foreign eXchange Office) interface cards. In this case, a move to TDM or Time Division Multiplexing would make economic sense. TDM is the digital standard for standard telephone trunking. A T1 voice line or ISDN PRI is an example of a TDM connection that multiplexes up to a couple of dozen phone lines onto a single TDM trunk line.

T1 lines using the TDM protocol are the mainstay of enterprise PBX telephone systems. Most all offer slots for one or more T1 TDM-based telephone trunk lines. An alternative is the T1 PRI or ISDN PRI line that offers the same trunkline service plus additional services such as Caller ID.

Well, what about VoIP? A pure VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol phone system operates completely in the IP world from handset to call termination. The PBX equivalent is the IP PBX which is may be a dedicated system or software, such as Asterisk, running on a standard Linux server. The handsets are referred to as SIP phones. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching protocol that controls the phone calls on packet based networks. Even your phone service can be brought in on a SIP Trunk, which is a private line or Internet connection to your VoIP service provider. Calls between subscribers to the same VoIP service provider stay completely on the network and never enter the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Calls to and from non-subscribers are terminated to the PSTN at the provider's location.

As you might guess, there are purely Analog phone systems, purely digital and TDM phone systems and purely VoIP phone systems. Most of the time, though, you can mix and match. A VoIP system may well have FXS (Foreign Exchange Subscriber or Station) ports to connect to analog handsets, as do traditional PBX systems. The phone service connection may be analog, T1 or ISDN, or SIP Trunking.

In general the newer IP PBX telephone systems offer a wider range of handset and phone service connection options than legacy PBX systems. But before you make any big purchases or plans to scrap you current system, why not review your options with one of our expert voice and data service consultants. You may have better options than you think.