The Cloud Offers Communications as a Service

By: John Shepler

The migration of everything to the cloud has coined a new phrase: “as a service”. This implies the business model of pay-as-you-go rather than owning vast capital equipment and software resources and the support staffs that go with them. You still need in-house support for your staff and to liaise with your cloud service provider, but you no longer have to be involved in all the nuts-and-bolts that make the system work.

In addition to the backroom business software humming along in the background, the cloud now offers to take on your electronic communications with the idea of offering a more features for less cost that you’d likely have if you tried to run everything in-house. The name of this new opportunity? Why, Communications as a Service, of course.

Two Flavors of Communications as a Service
If you think of communications as “the telephone”, you are partially right. The landline phone has been the mainstay of business for over a century. It has been joined by the FAX machine to send documents over those same phone lines and the mobile phone that frees us from the wires. The marriage between phones and computers has expanded options to include instant messaging, audio, video and web conferencing, texting, file sharing, call routing and recording, call analytics and integration with business applications like CRM and project management software.

Communications as a Service or CaaS splits off into Unified Communications as a Service or UCaaS and Contact Center as a Service or CCaaS. What’s the difference? UCaaS is intended for use within the company for team collaboration CCaaS is for communicating with customers. You can think of UCaaS as replacing the old PBX business phone system and CCaaS as a technical upgrade to the old call center phone system.

How Unified Communications as a Service Works
With UCaaS the PBX in the closet down the hall or the key telephone set on your desk is gone. If you have a desk phone it connects to your LAN using VoIP rather than its own proprietary phone network. Your new phone system is in the cloud. Since much of your business software is also in the cloud, that makes it easy to integrate traditional phone applications and traditional business software applications.

Phone, or shall we say voice, features including call recording, call forwarding, call routing, teleconferencing, Inclusion of smartphones into the company phone system, and inclusion of work-from-home employees into the company phone system.

But that’s just the start of what can be done. The unification of voice, video and devices means that you are interconnected wherever you are and whatever device you are working from. You don’t have to be near your desk to make or receive calls and you can share documents or collaborate on applications as well as have conversations.

Expanding into Contact Center as a Service
UCaaS is great for interconnecting everyone within a company. Wouldn’t it be great if you could also include customers? That’s been the function of the call center, now renamed contact center. CCaaS supports incoming customer service and outgoing customer marketing.

You still get as many phone sets as you need, but they’re on the network connected to the cloud and not a room full of equipment down the hall. Instead of buying and maintaining all that equipment, you subscribe to the CCaaS system. You’ll get automated outbound dialing, interactive voice response for customer self-service, automatic contact distribution, analytics and other features that have traditionally been part of call center operations.

In addition, CCaaS is omnichannel in that is can communicate with your customers through voice, SMS, video, web sites and social media. Chatbots and virtual agents can handle routine inquiries so that your employees can concentrate on the more difficult issues.

Benefits of Service in the Cloud
With cloud communications as a service, you no longer have to budget large capital outlays for massive amounts of equipment only to have to replace that same equipment years down the road. You are not bothered with having to install constant fixes and upgrades or scheduling time for a vendor to come and service your system. It’s all being done invisibly within the cloud operation. You get the latest features all kept up to date and with enough hardware to run everything. You simply subscribe for as much service as you need when you need it. As your business grows, your cloud service can expand as needed.

You have a choice in how you connect to the cloud. Some companies, especially smaller ones, simply use an Internet service with Direct Internet Access or SD WAN as the most reliable options. For even better performance and reliability a private line direct cloud connection makes the cloud seem part of your facility… as it should.

Are you ready to move up from an antiquated phone system to UCaaS or CCaaS? Talk with a technology expert and find out the features and prices of a system just right for your organization.

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.

The 3 Types of VoIP Lines for Business

By: John Shepler

Businesses large and small have been migrating to VoIP telephone technology for years now. Some are delighted with the move and have never look back. Others feel like they’ve lost something in the way of performance. The calls are often muddled and it’s hard to carry on a two way conversation. Would you believe that its the exact same technology involved? Why is it that VoIP telephony can range from excellent to unacceptable? Let’s take a look.

What’s VoIP
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is a means to convert telephones into computer peripherals. The reason to do that is both to save money and enable applications that just won’t work on the old style telephone network. Network voice is a powerful tool, but can more easily be degraded that simpler analog phones.

Old School Phone Systems
Business phone lines are sometimes called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. They consist of twisted copper pair wires that run directly from the phone set all the way to the telephone company. Each phone has its own set of wires. Once you get more than a few phones, however, you face a mounting phone bill since the telco charges you to make internal as well as external calls.

Companies get around this by installing their own phone switches. Small systems use Key Telephone Systems where multiple outside lines are available on each phone but you can also call within the building on your own wiring. Larger companies install PBX (Private Branch Exchange) switches that manage a pool of outside lines that can be assigned to any phone as needed.

If you only have a couple of phones, each with their own line, the phone company takes care of all the switching for you. With many phones, you become your own little phone company for inside calls. That means you have to take care of all the special phone wiring and the Key or PBX switching equipment. Plus, you have to pay for multiple outside analog lines or a digital PRI trunk to get to the public telephone system.

How VoIP is Different
With VoIP, each phone plugs into your company LAN. That gets rid of the second special phone network. You still need something to switch the calls between phones. This can be a VoIP PBX or IP PBX that you have in-house. It can also be a much larger hosted PBX system from a hosted VoIP service provider. Hosted means that a specialized company “hosts” or run the system. You are one of many clients that they host. It’s pretty much like buying web hosting. You simply pay by the month for service instead of having to install and maintain your own equipment.

VoIP Phone Line Needs
All VoIP phones connect to a local network. This can be a small home office network that has only a computer, WiFi router, VoIP phone adaptor (for a regular phone) and broadband modem. Or, it can be an extensive corporate LAN that is bridged into multiple business locations nationwide and even overseas. The principles and the requirements for high quality performance are the same.

Since the network is shared with many phones and other computing devices, it take some doing to make sure that you get high performance. With dedicated analog lines, that’s the phone company’s problem. With VoIP, it’s now your IT problem.

What’s needed is plenty of bandwidth to accommodate all the phones and other devices. But that’s not enough. You need to give the voice packets priority over data because phone calls will start sounding muddled and choppy long before you notice that the file is loading slower. The network also needs low latency, packet loss and jitter to be transparent to the packets carrying the VoIP digitized phone conversations.

3 Types of VoIP Phone Lines
All analog phone lines are alike. All ISDN PRI trunks are alike. VoIP phone lines can be quite different. They range from Internet VoIP to SIP Trunks to MPLS private networks.

Using the Internet as Your Phone LIne
The low end of the market, which keeps costs low for home offices and small businesses, uses a broadband Internet service to connect to the VoIP service provider. You can share your broadband connection with a couple of computers, a WiFi router, and a few VoIP phones. You’ll need a router that creates CoS (Class of Service) to prioritize the phones or the computers will interfere with your calls. Sometimes the service provider will give you an adaptor that does this.

The advantage of using the Internet as a phone line is that it’s cheap. You probably already have broadband for your computer. The lure is to save money by “eliminating the separate phone line.” The downside is that the Internet was never designed for telephony. It was intended to reliably transport data files. There is no prioritization of voice on the Internet and most access lines, like DSL, Cable, Satellite and Cellular, are shared broadband. It’s a cost vs performance tradeoff. You may find that some calls sound perfect but others break up or sound muddled. It all depends on what else is happening on the Internet while you are making your call.

One way to improve Internet VoIP is to use a dedicated Internet access (DIA) like T1 or Ethernet over Copper. This keeps your neighbors from disrupting your calls while they download large video and software programs, but you are still subject to network congestion on the Internet itself.

Private Line VoIP Service
Companies that depend on high quality phone service for customer support and employee productivity usually sidestep the Internet in favor of something more predictable. The outside line that compares most closely to the legacy analog and PRI lines is the SIP Trunk. This is a digital broadband line, but it is a private line that is not shared with others. It’s called a SIP trunk because it supports SIP or Session Initiation Protocol, the switching system for VoIP calls.

A simple SIP trunk is a T1 line that runs from your network to your service provider. It supports up to a couple dozen simultaneous phone conversations or a combination of phone calls and Internet. The Internet service has a lower priority than the phone calls and uses whatever bandwidth isn’t needed for the phones at any given time. Smaller companies that don’t have dozens of phones find this is a great cost saver compared to maintaining separate phone and broadband lines.

Larger SIP trunks are also available for bigger companies or call centers. Both copper and fiber optic bandwidth is available to support as many calls as you need.

Voice over MPLS Networks
Major corporations generally have many business sites located around the country and even in other countries. They still want any employee to easily call any other employee without paying long distance toll charges. They also need to make outside calls to anyone with a phone.

A sophisticated solution is called VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS networks. MPLS is a private network arrangement with a regional, national or international service footprint. The network operator ensures that each paying customer has the necessary Class of Service, bandwidth and low latency, packet loss and jitter that they need for high performance.

VoMPLS works a lot like VoIP using SIP Trunks. The difference is that instead of having to run dedicated private lines among all your locations, you simply need an access line from each location to the MPLS network. This can give you a major cost savings, especially on those long international connections, while maintaining high network performance.

Are you in search of a better telephone solution, to reduce costs, increase available features or both? If so, there are VoIP telephone solutions you should take a close look at.

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

Packet Voice Moves to the Cloud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

How Does Cloud Computing Work In Business?

We hear a lot about “the cloud” these days. Just what is the cloud and how does it help you do business better, faster and cheaper? Let’s have a look.

Usually when we say that business is cloudy, it’s not a good thing. Cloudy implies fuzzy and unpredictable. Wouldn’t you rather have clear and predictable instead? Financially speaking, of course you would. This is why people cock an eyebrow when somebody says you need to go off to the cloud somewhere.

You know, this is really a problem of semantics more than anything. When we talk about cloud computing, cloud storage or cloud networking, we’re not talking about dealing with fuzzy logic, quantum mechanics or anything else that you can’t quite nail down. The “cloud” with respect to IT and telecommunications services is quite determinate. The metaphor of the cloud is more about not having to be personally concerned about the details of how something is being accomplished rather than once you turn your back it’s a free for all.

Let’s take cloud storage for instance. This is becoming the most popular cloud service because it works for both business and non-business users. Everybody has data. Today most of that data is spinning on hard drives in personal computers. Some of it is stored in solid state memory chips inside tablets and smartphones. There are two services that the cloud can provide your data. First, it can safely store a copy in case disaster strikes and your hard drive crashes or you leave your laptop or smartphone in a taxi. If nothing else, there are thousands of personal photographs or client records amassed over the course of years that won’t disappear forever in an instant.

Second, the cloud can provide a central repository that you can access from whatever device you have at the moment and from wherever you happen to be. Sure, there are remote access programs that let you reach into your PC from across town. That assumes that you leave your computer on all the time and that a specialized client is available that will work on all devices for all types of data. It’s not quite the same as going to the online cloud “warehouse” to fetch a copy of whatever. In fact, it is getting to the point where you don’t have to fetch at all. All of your devices can sync with the cloud so that they either have a copy of the file locally or it appears to the user that they do.

Cloud storage as automatic backup makes sense because we all pretty much suck at remembering to backup files ourselves. You can improve this a bit by adding an external disk drive with a program like Apple’s Time Machine to automatically make copies whether you are paying attention or not. Still, if your house or office burns down you lose everything in the ash heap of melted hard drives.

The cloud gets away from the problem of having everything in one place where it can be destroyed all at once by keeping a copy hundreds or thousands of miles away. But the cloud also backs up its own data. Remember that the cloud is not some vaporous collection of neurons in the sky. It is realized as a secure data center with racks and racks full of hardware. That’s hardware that can fail just as surely as your desktop PC or local server. Cloud providers need RAID and other protections for disk data along with battery and generator backup power to ensure that those files will be there when you call for them.

The business model behind the cloud is that very large data centers operated by dedicated service providers who specialize in cloud services can give hundreds, thousands or millions of clients all the disk storage, servers and bandwidth that they could possibly use at a lower cost than having each and every client replicate that data center on a smaller basis.

The secret to a successful cloud is virtualization. This is a technique where a fixed pool of hardware resources is sliced and diced so that it can be apportioned to customers as needed. The virtualization software makes it appear to each customer that they are in control of 1 or 100 or 1,000 separate servers and Terabytes worth of disk drives. In actuality, there are fewer actual hardware servers than there are virtual servers because few applications need to hog a whole server to themselves. Sometimes, however, a virtual server will encompass more than one physical server because it really, really needs that much power. It doesn’t matter to the application, the client or the cloud whether a particular server is physical or virtual. The job gets done and the client gets billed by the capacity used.

One specialized cloud service is hosted VoIP, also called hosted PBX or hosted voice. This is a telephone switching system that handles your internal and external phone calls exactly as the most modern in-house PBX system would. The difference is that all you have in the building are phone sets and a SIP Trunk connecting your network to the service provider. Like cloud computing and storage, you pay for what you use and never have to make a capital investment. When you need more, you simply order more and you have it in a flash.

Does the idea of the cloud make more sense as a resource and potential cost saver over what you are doing now? If so, get more information on cloud computing and communications services and compare prices with doing everything yourself. That should definitely make things a lot clearer.

Can Hosted Voice Cut Your Phone Costs In Half?

A generation ago, a big cost savings opportunity was switching to a competing long distance telephone service provider. Both businesses and consumers went on a stampede once deregulation opened the door for competitors to the incumbent local phone companies and their lock on long distance prices. The real enabler was making the process all but invisible to the customer. Sure, there was some arcane procedural work involved in having your 1+ calls go to supplier B rather than supplier A. You didn’t have to deal with that. You simply called your new provider, fill out some paperwork or signed up online. The magic happened in a week or two and, suddenly, your long distance bills were lower.

There’s another stampede building right now. It’s the opportunity to move from the in-house phone system with trunk lines to the local telco to cloud hosted telephone services. In a way, what’s happening to local business telephone service is what happened to long distance decades ago. It’s moving to a lower cost model via disruptive technology. What will turn it into a full blown stampede is providers who make the move painless for their customers. Think about it. If you can cut your total phone costs in half without having to go through a gauntlet of technical gymnastics yourself, how can you not make the move?

Megapath, a full-service competitive telecom provider, is doing its best to become your next telephone company as well as your network services vendor. They’re doing this with a comprehensive hosted voice platform that makes it easy to get the phone services you need without YOU having to make the investment, develop the expertise or provide the staffing.

Just what is hosted voice and how can it offer such dramatic cost savings? It’s a matter of economy of scale. Every business can go out and buy a PBX switching system and a truck full of phones, wire all this up and bring in local dial tone with a bunch of POTS lines or an ISDN PRI trunk. Isn’t this pretty much what everyone has done? The alternative is to have a specialized service provider build a much larger switching system and the staff to run it and have companies who are not in the telephone business get their services remotely.

Hosted voice is a lot like website hosting in that instead of you maintaining your own servers, you pay by the month for someone else to provide the servers and the bandwidth that connects them to the internet. With hosted voice, you pay by the month for MegaPath or another hosted voice provider to switch all your in-house, local and long distance phone conversations and provide the telephone trunks that connect to the public phone system.

WIth hosted voice, there is no need to buy or maintain a local PBX phone system. You don’t need to lease any telephone lines. Whatever PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) connections you need will be provided. All you need are IP phones connected to your network and a voice gateway that that manages bandwidth to your service provider to ensure that voice quality has priority over other traffic. Capital investments are a thing of the past. You buy phones as you need them and you might even get the phones included free with your service plan.

It might not be immediately obvious that hosted voice with pay-as-you-go pricing has a flexibility that in-house systems lack. There is no need to buy more capacity than you can use right now. If you need 25 phones, then 25 phones and the service to run them is all you order. If you land a new contract and have to start hiring like crazy, then you go ahead and add “seats” to your system as needed. You pay incrementally more each month to match the increase in your business. You don’t go out and buy a big switching system to handle anticipated needs. The hosted voice provider has a system that can accommodate any possible number of phones you’ll ever order. That reserve capacity is something that works to your benefit but you don’t have to pay for.

The days of every company being in the telephone business are about over. The rise of hosted voice systems connected by SIP trunks, basically high bandwidth dedicated lines, enables a new model of telephony where you simply pay for what you need when you need it. Could this approach offer advantages for your company? Get competitive quotes for Hosted Voice Enterprise VoIP Telephony and compare them to your current costs, including what you have to invest in equipment and maintenance. It may be time for you to make the move to a hosted phone system.

Microsoft Communication In The Integra Cloud

There’s no doubt that business communication is getting more sophisticated. A multi-line telephone and a FAX machine might have sufficed years ago. Now, email is so last century. If you want to be on top of the productivity curve, you need have collaboration and unified communications in your tool set.

Sounds great, but how are you set up to support all the latest business communication services? Larger enterprises have dedicated staff to handle hardware, software, mobility, VPNs and everything else needed to support their electronic communication needs. Small and medium size companies aren’t so flush. If they can afford the cost of the servers and software packages, they may well need to depend on outside consultants to get everything working together and fight fires as they pop up. Otherwise, it’s get by as best you can. Seems like there ought to be a better way.

The cloud may well be that better way. The idea of cloud communications is that all the intricacies involved in multi-media electronic communication is hidden from the user. The provider takes care of the servers, the software, the maintenance, the integration, the setup and the troubleshooting. As a user, you do just that: You use the service. When you have trouble or need some extra feature, you call the service provider and they take care of it for you. Because they specialize in the cloud services they are offering, they have the resources to handle everything efficiently. Instead of investing and operating, you simply use and pay by the month for each user you have on-board.

A powerful combination of service and provider is Microsoft Communication Services and Integra Telecom. You are no doubt familiar with Microsoft software such as Outlook, Exchange, Lync and SharePoint. Are you aware that these services have been integrated with Microsoft Office Communications Server as a bundled cloud-based resource? Have a look at this video for a quick introduction:



Have you been toying with the idea of Hosted Microsoft Exchange or Hosted Outlook because you really don’t want to run your own data center? Why not go with the whole package of Microsoft Communication Services and leap to the cutting edge in one fell swoop? By the time you factor in what it will cost you to do everything this suite of communication services does in a piecemeal fashion, you might as well go with the cloud service and a solid provider.

How do you find a good provider? Start with Integra Telecom. They are more than just a cloud service provider. They are actually a competitive telecommunications carrier that has expanded their domain to include cloud services as well as connectivity. With Integra you have one point of contact and all the expertise to ensure that the services work correctly, plus assurance that you are efficiently connected at all times.

Integra runs an 11 state fiber optic network with 1,900 fiber fed buildings and many more connected via Ethernet over Copper. They provide high bandwidth services to customers in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah and Washington. They offer a complete range of telecom services that includes business phone lines and trunks, hosted PBX services, private networking including MPLS VPN and private line services, high speed Internet access, server colocation and cloud-based collaboration and messaging.

Have you reached the limits of what you can afford to purchase or support, yet need the productivity improvements that come with the latest unified communications services? You may find that cloud hosted solutions can give you far more for your dollar than doing it all yourself. Before you give up in frustration, get a quick quote for cloud communications services scaled to the size of your business. You may be able to afford a lot more than you think.

Best VoIP Providers For Business

Have you been thinking about making the move from multi-line analog or PRI trunk phone service to VoIP, but unsure about how well it will work? Here are some ideas and recommendations about what you can achieve and how to proceed successfully.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is also called “network voice” to distinguish it from traditional wireline phone service. The key word is “network.” VoIP is designed to run on computer networks rather than the proprietary telephone technologies we’ve been using for the last century. In fact, on the network, voice is just another service running along with data, video and streaming audio. Every service generates packets that are transported from source to destination using routers and switches on the network.

This presents a huge cost savings opportunity for larger businesses. Having one network to carry all traffic saves over having to maintain separate telephone and data networks. It’s less of an issue for smaller companies, although there are also cost savings in having one service provider connection instead of different telephone and broadband lines.

Where VoIP has gotten a dicey reputation is from using the Internet as both a telephone line and a broadband data service. The Internet wasn’t designed for high quality two-way voice conversations, so it’s a hit and miss proposition as to how good the voice quality of your conversations will be. Some calls may sound as good or better than the best analog line. Others will sound distorted and slightly delayed so that you and the other party cut off each other’s conversations. Residential users may not find this variable performance all that annoying, so they’re happy with the savings they get from dumping their analog landlines in favor of using their broadband Internet connection for both phone and computer service.

Business users who want clear conversations with their customers at all times have some better performing options available. Medium and larger companies will opt for a private line or MPLS network connection to their phone system provider. This is also called a SIP Trunk after the Session Initiation Protocol standard used for VoIP switching. A SIP trunk can support multiple simultaneous phone conversations, similar to an ISDN PRI trunk that is used with in-house PBX telephone systems.

Note that the type of VoIP service we’re talking about here is remotely hosted telephone switching at a service provider’s location. This is also known as Hosted VoIP, Hosted PBX, or communications in the cloud.

Small companies can also benefit from Hosted PBX service even if they have only a few to a few dozen telephones. In this case, the SIP Trunking provider supplies your business with an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that uses the SIP trunk to deliver both telephone and broadband Internet service. Unlike residential broadband phone service, the SIP trunk keeps the voice and data packets from interfering with each other. That maintains your voice quality on telephone calls. The phones have priority. Any bandwidth they are not using is automatically assigned as broadband Internet bandwidth. With some providers, you may also elect to plug existing analog phones into the IAD. This is called an analog handoff.

Another service that can provide both Internet and telephone service is Cable business broadband and telephone bundled service. You have one line coming into your office in the form of a coaxial cable. This cable carries telephone, broadband Internet and even television. Quality of service is maintained by keeping the telephone, television and Internet services in their own channels on the cable. Your phone service is VoIP technology, but your phone calls never touch the Internet. They just ride their own channel of the cable to a switching system that connects to the public telephone system. Note that to make this work, you need to get both your business broadband and phone service from the same Cable provider, like Comcast.

Are you interested in learning more about the advanced features and quality of service protections for VoIP service? Get features and pricing from the best VoIP providers for business telephone service now.

CAS vs PRI Voice Channels

T1 telephone trunk lines are popular with PBX and IP PBX phone systems. Most current equipment offers an interface connection so that you don’t need separate a CSU/DSU box to connect to the line. What you may not know is that there are two type of T1 telephone lines available. One is CAS and the other is PRI, also known as ISDN PRI.

T1 CAS is the original design for T1 lines used as telephone trunks. The line is channelized or divided into 24 separate segments of 8 bits each sampled at 8 Kbps. Multiply 8 bits by 8 Kbps and you get 64 Kbps, which is the capacity of one T1 channel or DS0. The designation DS0 stands for Digital Signal level 0, the basic building block of a T1 line.

What goes into a DS0? It’s one digitized telephone call. The process of converting from analog to digital is called PCM or Pulse Code Modulation. The 8 bits are enough to represent 256 different voice levels and provide excellent voice quality.

A collection of 24 channels of 8 bits each strung together end to end plus 1 extra bit defines a T1 frame. The extra bit is used to synchronize the equipment so that it knows where the frame starts. Hence, the designation “framing bit.”

Now, here’s where CAS comes in. Notice that each of the telephone channels is filled up with digitized voice. The framing bit is occupied in synchronizing the line. So, how do you communicate dialing and switching information? The dialing is handled by transmitting the DTMF dial-tones through the voice channels just like you would over an analog line. Knowing whether the channel is on-hook, off-hook, ringing, etc, needs to be handled by some extra bits that aren’t designed into the system. The way this is done is by “robbing” one bit from each channel periodically to create a signaling channel. This degrades the voice channels by such a small amount that it isn’t noticed.

The robbed bit signaling technique combined with DTMF dialing means that each channel is responsible for its own operation. This is what is called Channel Associated Signaling or CAS. Another name for this is in-band signaling. Each channel on a T1 line is equivalent to one analog telephone line. There are separate transmit and receive paths on the T1 so that you can talk and listen at the same time. This is full duplex operation.

Here’s something interesting. You don’t need a PBX system to use a T1 line to bring in multiple business phone lines. Instead, you buy a device called a Channel Bank that converts 24 phone lines to one T1 line. The channel bank handles all the interfacing and conversion back and forth between analog and digital protocols.

The other type of T1 telephone line that has become even more popular than T1 CAS is T1 PRI or ISDN PRI. ISDN is a set of digital standards that include a low speed and a high speed option (BRI and PRI). PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. You might think that it is something completely different from T1, but actually PRI is just a reorganization of the T1 channels.

With ISDN PRI, 23 of the 24 available voice channels are kept exactly the same as T1 voice channels, but are called B channels or Bearer channels. The remaining channel is called a D channel or Delta channel, sometimes called a Data channel. With ISDN, all the control and signaling is assigned to the D channel. There are no robbed bits from the voice channel. What that does is speed up the dialing and switching, an important feature for high volume call centers. The other advantage gained by having a D channel is that it can be used to supply digital data, such as Caller ID. ISDN signaling is known as CCS or Clear Channel Signaling to distinguish it from CAS. This is also referred to as out of band signaling as opposed to in-band signaling.

The nice thing about T1 lines is that they have well established standards to support both voice and data services. If you need telephone trunk lines for an in-house PBX or IP PBX systems, chances are that some configuration of T1 line will do the job. You may be surprised by how competitive T1 prices are now. Check T1 and ISDN PRI prices online to compare with your other telephone service options.

A Dedicated Line Between Offices

Many companies have two offices that they would like to link. These offices may be in the same city, across the country or even in different countries. What options are available to do this and what services can you get?

The traditional telecom services link between offices is the dedicated private line. T1 lines have been long used for this purpose because they are almost universally available and often the lowest cost solution. A point to point T1 data line will give you 1.5 Mbps of symmetrical bandwidth. That means 1.5 Mbps upload and 1.5 Mbps download. Symmetrical bandwidth is important when used to link business locations because you’ll have similar traffic levels going in both directions. That differs from the Internet where downloading predominates.

Two other characteristics of T1 lines are important to consider. One is that this is a private line. It’s like having a pair of wires connected at one building and the opposite end of the wires connected at the other building. In fact, for local T1 lines that may be close to the way it is wired up. Over longer distances, your T1 service will probably be multiplexed on a higher bandwidth connection, likely a fiber optic network, for the long haul portion of the interconnection. Regardless, you have a private service that is difficult for anyone to intercept. If you want to ensure the ultimate in privacy, you have the option to encrypt your transmissions on that line.

The other important characteristic of T1 lines is that the bandwidth is dedicated to your usage. You can load it up with two-way traffic 24/7 or just use it when you want to transfer a file. Whatever doesn’t get used just sits there waiting for you. You’ll never run into the situation where your service slows down because some other company is downloading HD videos from the Internet. This also means that there are no usage restrictions. Your T1 line can be used lightly or continuously and your bill at the end of the month will be the same.

T1 lines are available in both data and voice configurations. The voice configuration, called T1 telephone, can transport 24 separate phone conversations. A variation, T1 PRI or ISDN PRI transports 23 phone lines plus a switching and information channel used to provide Caller ID.

What if you need more bandwidth? The next step up with traditional telecom services is DS3 at 45 Mbps, followed by SONET fiber optic including OC-3 at 155 Mbps, OC-12 at 622 Mbps, OC-48 at 2.5 Gbps and OC-192 at 10 Gbps.

You also have the choice of Ethernet line services from typically 10 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps as point to point dedicated connections. Ethernet tends to be lower in cost than traditional services and more scalable. In other words, it’s easier to increase line speed with Ethernet than with T-carrier or SONET.

Another option to link offices, especially over long distances like coast to coast or internationally, is MPLS networking. MPLS networks are highly secure, well engineered to provide committed bandwidth levels, and reasonably priced. It may well be cheaper to order a last mile connection at each end and let the MPLS network handle the long haul than specify a dedicated point to point line service. You’ll get similar performance either way.

Are you looking to establish a dedicated line between offices, perhaps with one of them overseas? Compare options and prices online for T1, DS3 and Ethernet up to 1 Gbps. Note that US to international destination connections will require some manual effort to price, with quotes delivered promptly to your specifications.

VoIP Trunk Service Providers

Any business with more than a few outside phone lines knows that trunk lines are the way to go. The next question is what type of trunk service to get. You might think that with a VoIP telephone system, the obvious choice is SIP Trunking. But is it? Take a closer look at what’s available and then decide.

The idea of telephone trunking originated with the phone companies back when Ma Bell ran the industry. When phones were new, a couple of wires were all you needed to connect from your location to the local phone company. Then everybody wanted a phone and businesses started installing switchboards to handle all the lines they needed. You know those old-timey photos of phone line congestion in the cities. That’s what happens when you build out one line at a time.

The mass of subscriber lines was gotten under control using multi-pair cable, often buried. But long distance lines between switching offices were another matter. The more simultaneous calls you carried, the more wires were needed. That gets expensive fast when you’re talking about dozens or hundreds of miles. Wouldn’t it be nice if one pair of wires could carry multiple conversations?

That’s the origin of the trunk line. The early systems were set up like radio stations on the dial, except over wires. Each call modulated its own carrier frequency that was spaced far enough in the spectrum from adjacent carriers so that they wouldn’t interfere. This was analog carrier telephony. The switch from analog to digital technology came with the T1 line. It’s been around for at least half a century and is still going strong.

T1 telephone trunks are divided into 24 separate channels, each transporting one two-way telephone call. All the dialing and switching is done on these channels, just as it would be on analog phone lines. You can get devices called channel banks to convert T1 to and from 24 analog phone lines at your office. The T1 line itself is two twisted pair running from your building to the nearest phone company central office.

The advantage of T1 lines as telephone trunks is that save a lot of wire and can save cost, too. There is no economy of scale when you buy your phone lines one at a time. Soon you have a dozen or two at the price of a dozen or two times the cost of one line. If you convert all those lines into a T1 telephone line (trunk), you’ll generally save money even if you only use half the capacity of the T1. If you need dozens of lines for your call center, T1 can save you a bundle.

Chances are that you won’t need a channel bank unless your phone system is completely analog. Most PBX systems have T1 ports already installed. Even the new IP PBX systems designed for VoIP telephones usually have T1 ports where you just plug in one or more T1 lines for your outside telephone service.

A closely related service that is even more popular than T1 telephone trunks is ISDN PRI. This service runs on a T1 line and is very similar to a T1 trunk. The difference is that only 23 channels are used for individual phone lines. The remaining channel is used for all the dialing, switching and data such as Caller ID. The switching is faster than with T1 telephony and most everyone wants Caller ID anyway. The port for this is called a PRI, ISDN PRI or T1 PRI an it is likely installed in your system now.

The other digital trunk option that is becoming popular thanks to VoIP is the SIP Trunk. SIP is the switching protocol used with IP telephones in a VoIP system. A SIP Trunk, which might also be carried on a T1 line, is not broken up into channels. Instead it is more like your local area network that transports Ethernet packets.

This is one of the big advantages of a SIP Trunk. It can connect directly to your network without having to convert from one protocol to another. In fact, just like your network carries both VoIP phone traffic and computer data traffic, a SIP Trunk can provide both telephone and broadband service from your service provider. This is the preferred arrangement, as it allows the provider to establish class of service controls to maintain voice quality regardless of other network traffic.

As you might suspect, an IP PBX system works well with a SIP Trunk. But SIP trunks can also be ordered with customer premises equipment that offers a T1 or ISDN PRI digital handoff or even analog phone lines.

Which type of telephone trunking service is right for your business? Compare prices, availability and options of T1, PRI and SIP Trunks to see what makes the best economic as well as technical sense for your particular situation.



Etching of phone lines in New York City circa 1890 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Virtual Hosted PBX VoIP

There are various ways to implement VoIP. Some of them are excellent, others fall short of the mark. What you had in mind for VoIP in the first place was to save money and gain features. What you want to ensure is that the quality of your voice conversations will not suffer in the process.

That’s a tall order, but the technology is available to do exactly what you have in mind. The problem is that it can be a little tricky to get working properly. You can greatly increase your chances of having a successful implementation by getting some help with the installation. Not just by hiring a consultant, mind you. Move the tricky and expensive aspects of VoIP telephony to an expert provider and avoid the engineering and maintenance nightmare completely.

That’s the idea behind Virtual PBX systems, also called Hosted PBX. The PBX system itself has long been a fixture at most medium and larger size companies. There may not even be anyone on staff who remembers the day when all you had was a few phones and the telephone company took care of all that fancy switching. In a way, we’re moving back to that model of having just phones within the company and doing the connections elsewhere. The difference is mostly in the technology.

The first thing to know about virtual phone systems is the disappearance of the traditional telco wiring. That was the standard connection for analog telephones. Digital phones don’t need their own separate telephone network. They can ride along on the Ethernet LAN, along with all the computing equipment.

Phones do need a connection to your telephone service provider. That’s called a SIP Trunk. A SIP Trunk works like the ISDN PRI or T1 Phone line that connects to an in-house PBX system. The advantage of the SIP trunk is that it transports packets of all types. These can be voice packets from a telephone or data packets from the Internet. Some of the packets are switching signals for the telephones. They use a standard called Session Initiation Protocol which is where the term SIP comes from.

The phones that you use on the network are called IP phones. They look like a standard business phone with an RJ-45 network connector on the back in place of the usual telephone line jack. They are either powered by AC adaptors or over the network itself. This is called POE for Power over Ethernet. Some Ethernet switches offer this capability and save you the trouble of using AC adaptors. The switch can also provide battery backup so you can use your phones during a power outage.

The PBX system itself is located at the service provider. A hosted PBX or cloud PBX system is much larger than anything you’d buy for your own use. It’s operated and maintained by a dedicated staff so you don’t have to worry about outages, repairs or upgrades. What you have is a portal to that PBX system so that you can register your phones and decide on how the features work. All the in-house conversations are on the network so there aren’t per-minute charges. For calls that go outside, the hosted PBX has lines to the public telephone network. The economy of scale is so large that you can often get unlimited local and long distance calling as part of the per-seat monthly charge.

Are you considering a phone system installation, replacement or upgrade? Before you simply go the traditional route, check Virtual Hosted PBX VoIP service prices and see if it makes a lot more sense to rent rather than buy your business telephone system.

How HD Audio Will Transform VoIP

Those of us old enough to remember when phones were analog and switches were mechanical have a soft spot for the clarity of the old school system. There was a distinctness and intimacy to those old time conversations that has long been lost. Well, perhaps lost only for some decades. There’s a new move afoot to give VoIP phone conversations a starting fidelity that will make today’s handsets and cellphones seem like toy walkie talkies by comparison.

The technology is HD or high definition audio. It’s called HD Voice by Polycom, the telephone manufacturer producing IP telephones with this capability built-in. The idea is to reverse the steady decline in voice intelligibility that we’ve experienced with the digital transformation and create a new standard that is superior to anything that has come before.

There’s a parallel here. Something similar happened in the radio industry. If you’ve ever owned one of those big console radios from the 1930’s or even the table models from the 50’s, you know that AM radio can sound amazingly lifelike. The advent of transistor radios shrunk the size of the loudspeakers, and thus the range of sound frequencies that can be heard. “Tinny” was the word to describe the loss of low end or bass notes. Car radios added their own restrictions by rolling off the high frequencies to reduce noise and static. It took a new technology, FM radio, to expand the frequency range and eliminate the background noise before the term high fidelity could be applied.

Old-timey phones had very few parts. The carbon microphone and electromagnetic earphone were powered by a battery at the phone company and connected to a similar phone at the other end. There were no electronics in the circuit. The telephone company switch was really a mechanical switch that simply connected phones together. The resulting sound had a richness that made local conversations much closer to someone sitting next to you than you hear today.

I remember when I first noticed the difference. It was when the company I worked for upgraded their old phone system with a new digital PBX and desksets. The first calls seemed slightly more muffled, less sparkling clear on the new phones. The effect was subtle, but noticeable. There was no noise or distortion apparent, but something was missing.

What was missing, I later figured out, was some of the audio range in the conversation. It wasn’t digital that degraded phone audio specifically. It started with long distance calling. The analog carrier multiplexing used to load multiple conversations onto copper wire and microwave trunk lines needed filters to keep one conversation from interfering with another. After much research, a frequency range of 300 to 3400 Hz was selected as standard. Frequencies above 3400 Hz add to naturalness, but don’t limit understandability of speech very much. Get rid of them and you can transmit more telephone channels on a trunk. You also get rid of annoying hiss, which is a high frequency phenomena. Frequencies below 300 Hz also aren’t necessary for intelligibility, but certainly give voices and other sounds their distinctiveness. By getting rid of the low frequencies, problems with power line hum getting into phone lines are greatly reduced or eliminated.

This standard was maintained when the industry changed from analog to digital. It kept everything compatible and consistent. Digital technology was a boon to long distance calls, especially overseas. It totally eliminated the noise and crosstalk that were common in the analog era. That advantage went away with cell phones, which can be noisy or even drop out.

Early implementations of VoIP only made matters worse. Packet transmission added distortion from lost packets and variable transmission time or jitter. Latency, a time delay through the network, was almost unknown with analog and TDM telephony. Now it’s not uncommon on poorly implemented systems to have a clipping effect so that you can’t both talk at the same time.

What HD audio intends to do is to lift telephone voice quality to a new standard above and beyond what we’ve ever had. This is accomplished by using a wideband CODEC (Coder/Decoder) to handle the conversion from analog microphone and earpiece to digital transmission. Bandwidth is doubled to 7 kHz with the new standard G.722 Codec and can be extended up to 20 Khz, the same quality as CDs and digital FM radio.

HD Voice is here now. You can get it with Polycom business phones and a service provider like RealLinx that can provide the hosted PBX and carefully managed bandwidth to maintain high quality phone audio. Of course, this only works within an organization that is set up for HD Voice or among users that all have the G.722 Codec available. When one party is using traditional telephone technology, everything defaults to the universal G.711 telco standard and its limited frequency range.

Even so, higher fidelity within your organization can improve conversation intelligibility, including nuances in the voice that are often lost when talking on the phone rather than in person. This can be valuable when budgets and time restrictions reduce face to face meetings in favor of audio and video teleconferencing.

Are you ready to replace an aging phone system or order equipment for a new enterprise or new location? If so, why limit yourself to yesterday’s technology when you can have something that will provide a competitive edge at lower overall cost than you have now? Don’t make a move until you get pricing and features on HD Voice Hosted PBX VoIP telephone systems.

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.

Triple Play For Business

One of the hottest trends in consumer telecom services is called the “residential triple play.” This is a bundling that combines three electronic services that nearly every home subscribes to. They are television, telephone and broadband.

The bundling is made possible because one provider can deliver all three at a combined price that is lower than buying the same services from three separate providers. Cable companies are in the best position to deliver the triple play, but the package is also offered by telephone companies and wireless service providers. The advantage for cable is due to the very high bandwidth capability of their HFC (Hybrid Fiber Cable) facilities.

That’s great for consumers, but what about business? Is there such a thing as triple play for business? You bet. It’s available for businesses with their own business locations.

Not surprisingly, a huge provider of triple play is Comcast. You may know that Comcast is the largest Cable TV provider in the US. Comcast broadband is hugely popular with both consumers and small businesses. But did you also know that Comcast is the 3rd largest phone company in America?

The idea that the coaxial cable from a Cable company is pretty much the same as the one that connects the TV antenna on the roof is way out of date. Today’s cable is a sophisticated collection of multiplexed channels that carry voice, video and data equally well.

Multiplexing is the technique that divides the 1,000 MHz bandwidth capacity of the coaxial combined fiber and copper transmission facility into neatly spaced 6 MHz channels. Those channels are exactly the same size as over the air TV channels so it’s easy to fit one TV station per channel. However, those channels can be used for other purposes as well.

The two most popular non-TV services on Cable are broadband and telephone. You have your choice of one or more standard business phone lines or an ISDN PRI trunk line that is bundles up to 23 lines for connection to an in-house PBX telephone system.

You probably are using DSL, satellite or T1 lines now for your business broadband service. It’s likely that you’re getting something like 1 to 2 Mbps download bandwidth. DSL can go higher, but your bandwidth decreases the further you get from the telephone company central office. Cable has such high bandwidth capacity, that it delivers business broadband at 50 to 100 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. Comcast’s smallest service starts at 12 Mbps/2Mbps.

You’re probably wondering if you can afford a triple play package? It’s likely you can’t afford not to go this way if you have the type of business where your customers wait on-site, like a doctor’s office or auto service center. That's where the TV service of triple play has its value. There are also packages for businesses like bars and restaurants that serve a walk-in clientele. How much are we talking? About the price of that T1 line will get you faster broadband plus telephone service with basic TV channels included.

What if you don’t need television in your business? Is there such a thing as double play?

Of course. Many, many professional offices, retail stores and quick service restaurants need a combination of reliable phone service and high speed broadband to meet their needs. Get these two services cheaper than buying separately from a telephone company and an Internet service provider.

Can you cut costs while getting the same or better voice, data and video services for your company? It’s well worth your time to find out. Check availability and pricing for bundled business broadband, telephone and TV services now.

Business Broadband and Phone Comparison

Small and medium size businesses have a need for both broadband Internet access and business telephone service. Years ago, the answer was easy. Order a broadband service from an Internet Service Provider and then go visit the telephone company and order your business phone lines. These are still viable options, but today you have much more to choose from.

Most smaller businesses have limited bandwidth requirements, a fairly small collection of phones and very limited budgets. What often makes the most sense is a bundled service that includes both telephone and broadband service from the same provider. There are two primary bundled services that both offer a cost savings compared to buying your phone and Internet service separately.

The first is the integrated product known as Integrated T1 service or SIP Trunking. They both use the same technique of line sharing but differ in the connection method. Depending on your location, you may get a T1 line or an Ethernet line service.

Integrated services are based on the principle that one incoming line is cheaper than two. Unlike consumer broadband phone services that combine voice and data packets willy-nilly, Integrated T1 and SIP trunks use integrated access devices at each end to keep the voice and data separate. Both give priority to voice packets. When someone picks up a phone or answers a ringing line, the bandwidth to support that phone call is reserved for the duration of the call. When the phone hangs up, that bandwidth is released to the pool.

What’s is the bandwidth pool? That’s what’s used for your broadband Internet service. Let’s say you have an integrated T1 lines and no phones are in use. The full line bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps is used for broadband access. If nobody is using the Internet, say in the middle of the night, that line just runs idle.

The flip side of the coin is when you have a dozen phones in use. Those consume half the bandwidth of the T1 line. Your broadband speed sags to 750 Kbps, which can be no trouble at all for smaller companies using the Internet for credit card verification, email, Web browsing and online ordering.

SIP trunking works like Integrated T1 in that both manage the line bandwidth and prioritize telephone calls over Internet access. That way your phone quality is maintained and the variations in broadband bandwidth may not even be noticeable. If they are, you are simply trying to do to much with too small a service. T1 lines can be bonded and Ethernet based SIP Trunks offer a wide range of bandwidths to speed things up.

You might think that SIP trunking implies a VoIP phone system. Actually, you can configure the handoff to your internal phones to be analog, SIP based VoIP or ISDN PRI for a PBX telephone system. Similar handoff options are available for Integrated T1 lines.

A competitor to the integrated services of Integrated T1 and SIP trunking is Cable broadband. The Cable systems is organized differently, with everything assigned to channels. That’s because TV stations have always had assigned channels. Now there are channels on the Cable system that carry stations that have no over the air presence. Other channels can be assigned to carry broadband Internet or telephone calls.

The channelization of cable maintains the separation of voice, data and video so that they don’t interfere. You can order telephone and business broadband from your Cable provider. You can also include TV if you have the type of business with a public waiting room, like a auto service center or doctor’s office.

Which option is best for your company? Compare business broadband and phone options for pricing, features and availability to make the best decision for your particular needs.