Types of Business Telephone Lines

Business telephone lines, once available in only a single analog version, have proliferated over the years. You can still get the legacy analog subscriber loop. You can also get a variety of digital lines and trunks that may offer cost and performance advantages.

The basic business telephone line is little changed from its invention over a century ago. It consists of a single small gauge twisted pair copper wires that carry all the necessary signals. This is an analog telephone line. Analog phone service is also known as POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. Many businesses have multi-line phones, but all they do is connect to multiple POTS lines. One to four lines is typical of a small office phone system. If there are lighted pushbuttons for each outside line, this may be called a “key” telephone system.

POTS telephone lines generally include local and long distance calling, features such as Caller ID, 3 way calling, and perhaps a toll free number. One POTS line may be connected full time to an office FAX machine. Some companies that have digital telephone systems may still keep a POTS line for the FAX machine, as not all digital services support FAX.

The simplest digital phone line is a single VoIP or broadband phone service that uses the Internet as a substitute for the twisted pair analog phone line. The cost savings realized is due to the fact that most businesses need broadband Internet access as well as telephone service. Using the Internet to connect the phone to the service provider avoids the charges for a separate telephone line.

The main limitation to broadband phone service is that the Internet was never designed to support high quality two-way real time voice or video services. It is critical to have enough bandwidth to support all the voice and data traffic on the broadband connection and to give voice packets priority. When bandwidth becomes restricted, voice quality starts to get garbled and the call may even be dropped. Another factor is latency or time delay between source and destination. The longer the latency, the more the phone starts to act like a two-way radio where only one person can talk at a time. Latency is seldom, if ever, a factor on analog lines or carefully engineered private networks.

Enterprise VoIP systems, consisting of many telephone sets connected to a converged voice and data LAN, avoid the limitations of the Internet by using dedicated circuits transport calls between internal phones and to the connection point or termination with the Public Switched Telephone Network. That termination may be within the company, where the connection is to multiple POTS lines or a digital trunk line. It may also be at a service provider connected to the enterprise by a converged voice and data line called a SIP Trunk.

A “trunk” line is simply a bundling of multiple telephone lines in one cable. That may be a fat cable with many analog copper pair or it can be a digital trunk line with few wires that transport many telephone calls in channels or packet streams.

The most popular digital trunk line is called ISDN PRI. This is also called T1 PRI because it is carried on a T1 digital line. What a PRI digital trunk gives you are up to 23 outside telephone lines plus a dedicated channel for switching signals and data such as Caller ID. Some PBX telephone systems have provisions to connect to two or more PRI trunks. This is especially true for call centers and large corporate office buildings. Note that each of the business lines in the ISDN PRI trunk can be configured as local, long distance, inbound only, outbound only, toll free or some combination of these per customer requirements.

The newest business telephone trunk is called SIP Trunking. SIP is the control and signaling protocol for VoIP telephone systems. One SIP trunk can carry dozens of phone calls, even more than a PRI trunk. The other way SIP trunks can be configured is for both voice and data on the same line. This is especially valuable for companies that have converged networks shared by both computers and telephones. The SIP services provider brings in both broadband Internet access plus business telephone lines on the same SIP trunk.

What type of service will work best for your company? There may be a range of options to choose from. Get prices and availability for business telephone service now, so you have up to date information to make an informed purchasing decision.

866 Toll Free Numbers

We’re all familiar with 800 numbers. They were the first numbers we recognized as toll free. But did you know that there are other toll free numbers, too? What about 866? Is that really a toll free prefix?

Indeed it is. But is there a difference between 800 and 866 as far as toll free operation is considered? No, they work exactly the same. Just as 202 and 302 are toll number prefixes assigned to different locations, 800 and 866 are toll free numbers used nationwide.

That’s one difference between toll prefixes and toll free prefixes. Toll prefixes are used to designed numbers in a particular area. That’s why they are called area codes. Area code 202 is assigned to Washington, DC. Area code 302 is assigned to the entire state of Delaware.

The toll free number prefixes 800 and 866 do not have a geographical assignment. You can call an 800 or 866 number from anywhere in the country and you’ll reach your destination. You just may not know where, geographically, the number is being answered.

It should be noted that the idea of associating area codes with the physical location of the assigned telephone is going away with landlines being replaced by cell phones and VoIP or broadband phone. Neither wireless or broadband users are tethered to a particular location by a copper wire. In fact, some VoIP providers let you pick your desired area code regardless of where you happen to reside. That’s especially valuable when most of your calls come from a particular regional area. Calls from an area code to the same area code don’t pay interstate long distance charges. If your phone has a New York City area code, it will work like any other NYC local phone, even if you pick up the calls in San Francisco.

Toll free numbers take this concept to the next level. When someone dials a toll free number, they don’t pay for the toll charges regardless of where they are calling from or where the call is picked up. Please note that most toll free numbers are US only. You have make special arrangements to get an International toll free number.

Now let’s look at what happens on the receiving end of the call. If you are the owner of the toll free number, you’ll pay the cost of any calls you receive. Fortunately, with an inexpensive toll free service that cost will be minimal. What you get in return is a caller who is much more likely to dial your number than if they knew they had to pay long distance charges. This is a powerful incentive for call-in orders and customer service. In fact, customers have come to expect a toll free number and may balk at dealing with companies that don’t offer one.

Are toll free numbers really affordable by smaller businesses? Absolutely. You can get an 866 number assigned to you for just $2 and pay just $2 a month to maintain service. That service includes your exclusive use of the number, forwarding to any working phone including a cell phone, voice mail, plus FAX reception that forwards to your email. The cost of the calls is just 6.9 cents per minute for the continuous 48 US states. Calls from Alaska and Hawaii cost a bit extra.

For the same price as an 866 toll free number, you can also get one with the prefix 877 or 888. They work just the same as 866. You can also get an 800 number for the slightly higher fee of $5 plus $5 per month service fee and the same 6.9 cents per minute rate.

The Analog Telephone Adaptor Enables VoIP

The role of the ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor is to turn regular telephones into VoIP telephones. To perform this magic, the ATA has to fool the telephone set into thinking it is plugged into a standard telephone line. It also has to fool the broadband Internet connection into thinking it is plugged into a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) telephone compatible with the VoIP provider's service.

The electrical interface is perhaps the easiest to achieve. On the analog side, the phone plugs into a standard RJ-11 jack like you would find on a wall socket. This delivers the standard -48 V DC to power the handset along with the dial tone, AC ringing, and Caller ID signals when needed. It has to detect standard DTMF (Dual Tone Multi-Frequency) touch-tone waveforms from the keypad and convert them to digital format for IP signaling using Session Initiation Protocol, the standard for VoIP.

How does the analog voice become digital and back to analog again? That's the function of the Codec or Coder/Decoder. The standard in use since digital telephony was invented is G.711. But there are other codecs that must also supported. These may include G.723, G.729, G.728 and G.726.

On the network side, The ATA has to terminate a standard Ethernet connection, usually 10/100 Mbps through a RJ-45 connector labeled as WAN. Many newer ATAs take this a step further by including a second Ethernet port labeled LAN. This is for connection to a PC in lieu of connecting the PC directly to DSL, Cable Modem or T1 WAN. The ATA performs the function of an Ethernet switch or router. This is not just to save the cost of a separate device so that PC and telephone can share the same broadband connection. When a router is included in the ATA, it then has the ability to ensure quality of service by giving voice packets priority over computer data packets so that using the PC doesn't interrupt telephone calls.

Maintaining voice quality while minimizing bandwidth is also the function of signal processing within the ATA. Some common processes include line echo cancellation and dynamic jitter buffer that compensates for variations in Internet line speed. PLC or Packet Loss Concealment deals with missing or out of sequence packets. Either the packet is replaced with a zero packet, a copy of an already received packet, or an interpolation between the preceding and following packets. VAD or Voice Activity Detection senses when you are talking and stops generating packets while you are listening to reduce bandwidth needs. Because digital lines have no traditional analog "hiss", people sometimes equate silence with a lost connection. CNG or Comfort Noise Generation recreates that low level background noise to indicate that the connection between phones is still in place.

All of these functions have been integrated into a package you can hold in your hand, in the HandyTone 502 ATA that is provided at no cost when you order PhonePower VoIP telephone service for residential and small business use. You can use the analog phone you have now, including cordless phones with multiple handsets.

Other VoIP service providers have also gone the route of providing their customers with complimentary ATAs to make the transition from traditional analog to digital VoIP as easy as possible.

Phone Power... To The People

Enterprise VoIP and broadband phone service for residential users is busily chipping away at the hundred year old switched telephone industry. But what makes the tried and true approach vulnerable? Prices!

Traditional telephony is set up on a tariff basis that nickels and dimes you for every little thing. First you pay a line cost. Then there's local phone service. Long distance is extra with charges for every minute called. Features such as Caller-ID are add-on extras. They even want to charge you a monthly fee for servicing the wires in your home or building, just in case some crazed rodent decides to have copper for breakfast. Is it no wonder your eyes bug out when your phone bill arrives?

Large corporations caught on to this game a long time ago and have been steadily upgrading their facilities with in-house VoIP telephone handsets and IP PBX phone systems connected to competitive ISDN PRI or SIP Trunking digital service providers. Smaller businesses and home phone users are headed the same direction. Except that they need something much smaller in both scale and price.

Broadband telephone service allows new highly competitive telephone companies to vie for your business even though they don't own the copper telephone wires that are so jealously guarded by the incumbent phone companies. How to they get around that monopoly? They piggyback on the broadband Internet service that just about everyone has these days.

Phone Power is one of these new generation telephone service providers that has something attractive for both home and business users. Residential plans start at $14.95 a month with a special introductory offer of $9.99 a month for 3 months available as of this writing. That low price gives you 500 minutes of long distance per month plus Caller ID, voice mail and other highly desirable features. I counted 26 of them on the list and they're all included in the basic price. Need more minutes? Low cost upgrades are available.

Phone Power's business service is even more intriguing. It's a virtual PBX system that you order by the line. Each line is $39.95 a month. Start with one or two. Add more as your business grows. You get big company features such as an auto attendant (electronic operator) and hunt groups to tie your phones together. Seems like a great way for small businesses, even home based businesses, to get started with a professional grade phone service.

In addition to low cost local and long distance, international calling rates are also very attractive with this service. Have a look at what Phone Power has to offer.

Know the Lingo to Save Money

If you want to be successful with any technology, you need to know the lingo. The world of VoIP telephony is no different. Actually it is. There is a Lingo as well as lingo.

Lingo the company and product, not lingo the vernacular, is a broadband phone service with offerings for both residential and business users. These offers are intended to save users considerable cost versus conventional wireline telephone service, especially if you have reason to call overseas from the United States.

Let's take a look at the residential plans first. You can choose from Chatter Box, Global Gabber, Lingo Link, Small Talk, South Asia, Talk 365, and LatAM SaveMore. Gotta love those names.

Chatter Box is the featured plan. It's priced at $21.95 a month. For that you get unlimited calling to numbers in the US and Canada. Sounds similar to other VoIP services on the market. But, Chatter Box also gives you unlimited calling to UK, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Finland, Austria, Luxembourg, Norway, Vatican City, Portugal, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, & South Korea as well. If you have friends or relatives in any of these countries, you'll have a hard time beating this deal.

LatAM Save More is the same price, but gives you unlimited calling to US, Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Caracas, & Rio de Janeiro. LatAM being Latin America, of course.

South Asia gives you unlimited calling to the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. But the 2.9 cent per minute long distance rates to India and Bangladesh are what make this plan truly special.

The lowest cost residential plan is appropriately called Small Talk. This one is for the person who wants home phone service but isn't a heavy user. You get 500 minutes to call anywhere in the US, Canada or Puerto Rico. You only pay $14.95 a month. Let's see the phone company beat that.

Business calling plans start at $39.5 a month for 500 minutes to the US, Canada and Puerto Rico, and go up to $79.95 for unlimited calling to US, Canada, UK, Puerto Rico, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Finland, Luxembourg, Norway, Australia, Vatican City, Portugal, New Zealand, China, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong & Taiwan. If you do business internationally, I don't see how you can miss with this service.

Business plans differ from residential plans in that they include the Lingo Office Assistant. This is software in the form of a toolbar that's added to Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer. With it, you can make calls directly from your desktop, access voicemail, and set up your cell phone or home phone to be your business phone.

Wired Magazine named Lingo as it's Editor's Pick for a VoIP telephone service. They describe domestic calls as sounding superb, which is not always the case with phone services that share a broadband connection with your computer.

Is Lingo right for you? Learn more about the Lingo service plans and the many, many included features. Also check prices and special offers, which are always subject to change in this competitive business. If you like what you see, go ahead and sign up quickly and easily online. You have a 30 day money back guarantee from Lingo to ensure your satisfaction with their service.

VoIP Without The Internet

VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol telephony made its name as an Internet based telephone service alternative. The idea was to use the broadband connection that most residential and business users had in place to also connect with their phone service provider. Competitive service providers could avoid paying the local telephone companies to lease the existing copper phone lines and offer a better bundled price to customers. In theory, it should be easy for the gigantic Internet pipe to transport low bandwidth voice streams.

Well, that's the theory. In practice, that big pipe isn't always so infinitely large. Like the super highway it emulates, Internet paths can become congested with packets just as easily as highways become congested with cars. Bandwidth congestion, transmission delays called latency, and dropped packets can easily tear up a phone conversation or any other type of real time data stream.

Most of the problem is in the infamous first-mile. That's the connection between your location and your service provider's point of presence or POP. Shared bandwidth arrangements such as DSL and Cable broadband make no guarantees as to availability or quality of service. One minute everything is working great. Next minute the line goes dead. Or at least the conversation gets garbled from time to time.

Consumers might put up with this level of performance if they can save enough money on their phone bill. But businesses really can't afford the customer annoyance and lost connections during important conversations. Having experienced problems with VoIP installations or hearing horror stories has convinced many businesses to hunker down and avoid the entire network voice issue. Others have worked out arrangements so that they can have the best of both worlds. They get the reliability and voice quality they've come to expect from the public switched telephone network. Plus the cost savings and added features that come from a converged voice and data network.

How do the successful businesses do it? For many the secret is as simple as avoiding the Internet for anything but Web and email access or electronic data interchange. But that doesn't have to mean maintaining a bank of analog phone lines and an ancient telephone system. There are at least two ways to have your VoIP without having to eat the problems too.

The first approach is to go with a hybrid PBX phone system. Within your plant, the phones and switch are IP based. SIP telephones and an IP PBX system allow you to use a single Ethernet LAN to connect both computers and phones. Yes, you'll need to carefully engineer your network to make sure that voice packets move unrestricted. But that may well be worth the effort to eliminate the separate telephone network and all its maintenance expense. With the hybrid approach, IP stops at the IP PBX. Plug-in interface cards for T1 PRI trunks or simple analog lines bring in conventional telephone service.

The second approach is to employ SIP trunking to connect your IP PBX to your competitive phone service provider. SIP trunking is a private line arrangement that maintains the integrity of the VoIP packets all the way from telephone set to service provider. The SIP trunk is usually shared with Internet data coming from the service provider to your network. However, your voice packets never traverse the public Internet. They stay on the SIP trunk until they are terminated to the public telephone network by your provider. You are never in contention with other users for the bandwidth that transmits your voice and data packets.

Both of these approaches give you control over Quality of Service for your telephone calls. Either you connect to the public phone network at your company location. Or your send your call streams to your service provider over a carefully engineered private line. It avoids the contention and variability that are inherent to that public facility that is the Internet.

Are you interested in improving your business telephone system but concerned about maintaining quality and reliability. Let our expert consultants recommend alternative approaches that address those concerns but also offer capital and operational cost savings. Tell us about your needs at EnterpriseVoIP.com.

VoIP That Sounds Better Than TDM Phone Calls

There is a conventional wisdom that says VoIP phone calls will always sound worse than traditional circuit switched calls using the time-honored TDM transmission system. What's more, the impression is that technology limitations ensure that VoIP can never even equal the voice quality of TDM calls. What if I told you that VoIP can sound at least twice as good as TDM and perhaps even good enough to transmit high fidelity music? Would you buy that? Actually you already can.

Astounded? I'll bet. The image of IP telephony has been severely tarnished over the years. It started with PC softphones using dial-up Internet services to make computer to computer phone calls. As long as this stayed in the realm of a hobby or a means of conversing around the world for free, it was OK. The fact that that the voices sounded like they were coming from the moon was less important than avoiding outrageous international phone rates. Everything was fine until low-end Internet Telephony started being sold as a replacement for "real" telephone service.

Even over broadband connections, poorly implemented consumer and business VoIP solutions can leave a lot to be desired. The all too familiar clipped conversations, vocal distortion, echoes and even dropped calls are seen as a necessary evil that comes with lower cost phone services. What gets lost is the fact that VoIP telephony offers opportunities to improve phone system performance, not degrade it.

All of this has made some businesses goosey about using VoIP. Even new IP PBX installations implement VoIP only for calls within the organization. A TDM interface card terminates the calls to the public switched telephone network before they leave the building. Sip Trunking from enterprise level providers such as BandTel is now convincing corporate telecom managers that they can maintain TDM voice quality while saving money over terminating calls themselves. But what about actually improving voice quality? Is this for real?

It is, but it's not widely deployed as of yet. The secret is in the CODEC you are using. A CODEC, coder / decoder, is the chip that takes an analog voice signal from your handset and converts it to and from digital packets that can be conveyed over a computer network. The grandfather of all CODECs is G.711, an ITU standard that was developed to implement digital trunking over 50 years ago. This is the one that all phone companies use to transmit long distance calls. It's also the default CODEC for digital handsets, including IP phones. Why? Because you can be sure that no matter who you call, they have G.711 available.

G.711 is called the "toll quality" standard CODEC. That's because it replaced existing analog carrier telephony standards with the same bandwidth per channel. That bandwidth is 3 KHz, ranging from 300 to 3300 Hz. You wouldn't be impressed with an AM radio that had a frequency response of 300 to 3,300 Hz, but this is what we've come to accept as the gold standard for telephone calls. Sometimes this narrow bandpass is sold as being tuned to enhance voice signals, since it does tend to filter out low level power line hum and high frequency hiss. But it also cuts out so much of the vocal range that it can be hard to understand some speakers.

What's better? A wideband CODEC gaining acceptance is G.722. It's also an international standard. Wideband refers to the fact that G.722 offers a frequency response of 50 to 7,000 Hz. That's better response than many small radios and enough to make voices sound natural, not "tinny."

Oh, but how much bandwidth is that going to consume on the network? The same, actually. The bandwidth for G.711 is 64 Kbps. The bandwidth for G.722 is also 64 Kbps. How can that be? Compression. G.711 is an uncompressed datastream. G.722 requires more sophisticated processing to cram more vocal range into the same bandwidth. Think of it a little like MP3 encoding for music. With clever algorithms, you can eliminate redundant and unnecessary data bits that won't be noticed by the listener.

How can you improve the voice quality of your VoIP phone system? If your handsets and system support G.722, use this CODEC instead of G.711. If your system only supports G.711 or the lower bitrate G.729 CODEC, you'll need to upgrade to experience wideband voice. Polycom is a leader in improving VoIP sound quality, calling their approach HD Voice. They implement a standard variation of G.722 plus careful voice processing for echo cancellation and noise reduction in their handsets and systems. You can listen to recorded samples of voice and music that make the improvement very apparent.

Implementing HD Voice or G.722 within your company gains the immediate benefit of less fatiguing, easier to understand phone conversations. As long as your telephony remains packetized, such as over a point to point T1 data line to another branch office, you maintain the advantage of wideband voice signals. The fly in the ointment is that inevitable connection to the outside world. Right now all calls will be converted to the G.711 standard as soon as they touch the PSTN. And there goes the quality improvement. Only by using a voice and data extranet to your customers or suppliers, or by sharing the same SIP trunking provider that keeps your calls as packetized voice, can you currently enjoy extended quality telephone calls outside your company.

VoIP Land Lines Complement Wireless

The name often given to traditional analog phone lines is "land lines". You may also hear this term associated with digital services, such as T1 lines. Both analog and digital telephony have been provisioned on pairs of copper wires often buried in the ground since the inception of telephone service two centuries ago. But the term land line is also used to distinguish telecom services over copper wire from satellite and cellular wireless services.

You might think that land lines and wireless are completely different technologies that don't really intersect. But now there's a mix of the two that gives users important advantages. In this case, landlines and wireless complement rather than compete with each other.

What makes this work is a new form of land lines you can call VoIP land lines. A VoIP land line is a wireline service that carries packetized voice rather than analog or TDM telephone service. For consumers that's almost always DSL or Cable Internet service. Business users might also have T1 dedicated Internet service or SIP trunking for IP telephony transport.

VoIP land lines support broadband phone service. But that's often a secondary use of the land lines. Broadband lines are usually installed to get broadband Internet service as a replacement for slow dial-up. But once you have broadband Internet, you can use it for both your computers and an adapter that makes your telephone act something like a computer. What the ATA or analog telephone adapter is really doing is converting the phone signals from analog to digital and organizing them into IP or Internet Protocol packets that are indistinguishable from other traffic on the Internet. The ATA communicates with a VoIP phone service provider that lets your phone call any other phone in the world.

Seems like a long way around just to have the same phone service that's always been hooked up to that landline buried decades ago in the back yard. The reason people do this is that VoIP or broadband phone service is often much less expensive than what your local phone company charges for its legacy phone service.

For example, consider SunRocket VoIP. SunRocket is an independent broadband phone service that offers a unique annual plan giving you 12 months of unlimited calling anywhere in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Canada. Up to 100 minutes of international calling is included each month. Calling features that the local phone company usually charges extra for, like Caller ID, is also included.

The key to this savings, of course, is that you are already paying for broadband Internet service for your computers. The VoIP telephone service simply piggybacks on the DSL or Cable Internet broadband you have now. It's an especially attractive deal for Cable Internet users, since they don't need their old land line service for telephone or Internet connections anymore.

So what does this have to do with wireless? Just about everyone has a cellular phone these days so that they can communicate on the go. Where VoIP land lines complement cellular is that low cost VoIP service gives you unlimited minutes when calling or receiving calls. Heavy users of cellular know that you have to ration your anytime minutes or buy a really expensive plan with thousands of minutes. You pay a fortune and some months they go to waste. By having both a low minutes cell phone plan and home VoIP phone service, you can talk all you want and still have the advantage of mobility when you need it.

Wireless complements VoIP both for the mobility and the emergency backup. VoIP land lines are dependent on your DSL or Cable modem, Analog Telephone Adapter, and perhaps a router. When you lose power, you lose your VoIP connectivity unless you have battery backup on everything. When your broadband service goes down, so does your VoIP. Most people don't have that much trouble with outages, but it's reassuring to know that you can always use your cell phone to call 911 if you need to.

If this sound like a good arrangement to you, consider SunRocket VoIP for residential broadband phone service. If you don't already have broadband, you can find DSL and Cable Internet providers with a quick search. Need a great deal on a cell phone and service? Check out the current special offers at Cell Phone Plans Finder.

Note that these services are intended for home users. If you have a business location in need of excellent pricing on telecommunication services, try Enterprise VoIP for equipment, digital lines, installations and service.