Voice over Internet Protocol Phone Services

Voice or Internet Protocol or VoIP appears destined to replace traditional wireline telephone services such as POTS (Plain Old Telephone Services) and even ISDN PRI digital trunks. What’s behind this shift in technology and what’s the key to maintaining voice quality with a new type of phone service.

The fundamental shift in technology can really be boiled down to a move toward computer networks and away from telephone networks. Also in the mix is the inclusion of wireless voice and data services that add another layer of complication.

Telephone networks started with Alexander Graham Bell and remained largely analog for most their century of dominance. Back when everyone had a telephone line and nobody knew what broadband meant, there was an effort to get the telephone system to do double duty as a means of voice communication and also computer communication via analog modems. This quickly hit its technical limit because the telephone network was designed for the human voice, which has a very low bandwidth requirement.

There was an effort to move to digital phone lines, called ISDN, but it was too little too late. Cable and DSL broadband offered much higher speeds at lower cost. Businesses ordered T1 and T3 lines, originally developed for digitizing phone lines and bundling them to save transmission costs between telco offices. These digital lines work just fine as point to point or dedicated Internet connections for data transmission. In fact, they’re still the most popular connectivity for small and medium businesses because of plunging prices and high reliability.

VoIP came out of the computer, not telephone, world. The IP stands for Internet Protocol, the most popular networking standard. Yes, it does say Internet protocol, but that doesn’t mean it is limited to the Internet. In fact, the Internet would have probably stayed an obscure academic network had it not been for the development of Ethernet as a way to connect computers and their peripherals.

The difference between telephone networks and computer networks is the difference between switched circuit networks and packet switched networks. Switched circuit networks, like the telephone network, actually switch connections to set up a private path for each phone call. This is bit like switching electrical circuits to power something as long as you need to use it. Packet switched networks are more like the US Mail. The network provides hard pathways to every destination. Each letter or packet gets where it is going by looking at the address for that individual packet and routing it accordingly.

VoIP is simply a way to send a set of packets in real time that are digitized pieces of a telephone conversation. Put them together end to end and the voice from the distant location is recreated. When it works well it sounds just like a telephone call, although you can also use a computer for two way conversations if it has a microphone and loudspeakers or earbuds.

Just like computers have struggled to press the century old telephone system into service for carrying data packets, computer networks have struggled with carrying sensitive voice packets on a system designed to reliably transfer data files even if parts had to be resent due to network errors. When VoIP goes bad, it sounds garbled and clips each side of the conversation. That’s a symptom of a network that isn’t optimized for real time voice packets that have to get through without error, jitter and time delay (latency).

The Internet is hit and miss when it comes to carrying VoIP telephony. If you have sufficient bandwidth and little congestion, you can experience a decent quality call. That’s especially true if cell phone call quality is what you are comparing to. If the Internet is having problems or getting congested, you may come to miss your old faithful landline.

Businesses that require optimal voice quality don’t use the Internet as their phone connection. Instead, they use private lines or MPLS networks that are engineered to support packet voice signals. You may hear this referred to as enterprise voice or enterprise VoIP, even though there is no Internet involved with the Internet protocol in this case.

Are you considering a move to VoIP with your next business telephone system upgrade? If so, be sure to understand the costs and tradeoffs with Internet vs non-Internet implementations. You can get that help along with pricing and availability for Enterprise VoIP telephony at no cost or obligation for serious business applications.

Managed Hosting PBX Gets You Out Of The Telephone Business

Many companies aren’t just in the business space they target. They’re also in some peripheral businesses simply because they can’t get out of them. For instance, how many companies wind up in the phone business because they need phones to do their job? It’s something that we may just shrug and accept, but it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.

What got businesses into the phone business was the need to manage anywhere from dozens to thousands of telephone sets within their organization. Why so many? Because the productivity that comes from each individual having their own telephone and phone number exceeds the cost of the equipment and service.

Back when most of us worked on the farm, one crank phone in the house was plenty. When we all became factory workers, a wall phone that you used on breaks served the need. Now that we’re in the information age, interpersonal communications is both necessary and frequent. We all need to talk to customers, suppliers and co-workers. The more efficiently we do this, the more profit the company makes.

This is how we got to telecom departments within companies. The telecom department manages the PBX, which is nothing more than a small version of a telephone company central office switch. All those handsets plug into the PBX and the PBX then connects them together like the phone company does. The PBX also manages outside lines for calls that enter and leave the company premises. In most cases, you dial outside with a one number access code just like you would call long distance anywhere else.

What the telecom department does is manage all those handsets. If one breaks, it has to be replaced. If someone changes desks, their phone number must be re-routed to their new location. That might even involve making some wiring changes. People are always coming and going, and their phone service needs to be accommodated too.

Some companies have two separate departments. One is just for telephones. The other is for computers and the company LAN. In a smaller company, one department might manage both networks. A very small company might outsource one or both functions to a contractor. But the cost of the activity is always there, no matter how you handle it.

The cost being in the phone business is both the cost of handling all those moves, adds and changes on a daily basis and the capital expense of all that equipment. The PBX system itself is an expensive piece of equipment. When it becomes too small to handle the number of extensions or too old to be easily maintained, you need to take out a loan and do what’s called a “fork lift upgrade” to haul out the old system and bring in the new one.

Now, what if there was an easy way to have all the communications ability you have now, and more, but not have to be in the phone business? There is such an option available and it’s called a hosted PBX. What “hosted” means is that someone else has the responsibility of managing the PBX equipment using their people at their facility. What you have is a big empty space where the PBX system used to sit and lots and lots of telephone sets.

When this is done right, an employee in your company won’t know or care where the PBX is. Their phone works just the same either way. In fact, it may work better because their old “dumb” phone has been replaced by a “smart” phone that connects to the computer network and has processing power built-in. The phone and the computer may work together or you may even have a “soft phone” as an application that runs on the computer.

It’s the ubiquity of the company computer network connected to every desk that makes the hosted PBX possible. By adapting telephones to transmit and receive Ethernet packets instead of analog voltages, they can piggyback on the broadband network that every company has anyway. That network invariably connects to the outside world or WAN, which can include a connection to a service provider hundreds or thousands of miles away. That service provider bears the capital cost and operating expense and performs the move/add/change function for you. They’re more efficient at doing this because that’s all they do, and they do it on a much larger scale than you did. In effect, we’re back to telephone as a service or, in today’s terms, voice as a service.

Are you reluctantly in the telephone business? If so, why not compare costs and features and see if a managed PBX hosting solution would be a better option for your company? There are more and better options available today than ever before.

How Voice over MPLS Expands Enterprise VoIP

Medium and large enterprises have been converting from traditional telephone and computer connections to VoIP over converged networks. The reasons are higher productivity and lower costs. But what happens when you connect your phones and computer network to the outside world? Do you lose the advantage of your enterprise VoIP technology?

Sadly, for some businesses, this is the case. Everything is efficiently connected over a high performance local area network. That network stops at the edge of the premises. In order to connect with other business locations, both voice and data must be transmitted over common carrier telecom services. This is true for each location. There is one architecture for the internal network and quite a different one for the transport service.

Typical interfaces include a PBX telephone system that connects to multiple outside telephone lines. These may be individual analog business lines or a digital ISDN PRI trunk line. In either case, the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network is used to make calls to both outside phones and the phone systems of the other company locations.

Computer networking is handled with point to point dedicated lines, often set up in a star network with headquarters doing the routing for all locations. This works well, but can be quite expensive when locations are on different coasts or in nearly every state. Add international locations and costs skyrocket.

What’s a better solution? The latest technology is MPLS networking. An MPLS network is a privately operated “cloud” network that uses a special tag switching system instead of IP routers to manage traffic. MPLS networks offer quality of service mechanisms so that real-time traffic, like voice and video, are unaffected by simultaneous data file transfers. That makes MPLS networks ideally suited to extending converged networks among as many locations as needed.

How can this benefit your organization? By interconnecting all of your locations through an MPLS network, you can create a seamless internal voice and data network for telephones and computer connections. Using an MPLS network to carry telephone traffic is known as VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS.

With VoMPLS, all of your internal telephone calls stay off the public phone network and you avoid toll charges. Only when you need to make an outside call do you need to connect to the PSTN. This can be an enormous cost savings compared to your monthly phone bill now. Similarly, the cost of using an MPLS network for file transfers can be considerably less than the cost of all those dedicated lines and the effort it takes to maintain a proprietary network. Plus, any productivity enhancements you’ve achieved by converging your voice and data networks can be shared among your other business locations.

Can Voice over MPLS technology offer you a significant cost reduction? Why now get cost quotes for a VoMPLS networking solution to links all of your business locations? The savings and performance can be impressive.

Telephony In The Cloud

Thinking about cloud networking, what normally comes to mind is meshed data networks transferring packets from location to location. But some companies are also moving their telephone services to the cloud. What advantages and challenges does this present?

In a way, the original public switched telephone network is the oldest existing example of a cloud network. It is a managed system, carefully engineered to assure availability and quality of service, that serves a vast number of users simultaneously. Each customer connects to the cloud via a direct line to the nearest cloud port at the local central office. Users don’t really care to know what goes on in those vast switching offices. They just want to be able to make a call from one location to another at will.

Some companies engineer their own telephone cloud networks using ISDN PRI digital lines to connect PBX systems at multiple offices. The advantage of doing this compared to using the public network is that you don’t have to pay for each call. Only those calls to and from the outside world are subject to a fee.

The more modern approach is to set up converged voice and data networks between business locations so that only one network need be maintained. MPLS networks are often used to implement this cloud network, as they are capable of maintaining quality of service at reasonable cost. On a large scale, this is known as enterprise VoIP. There may be only one IP PBX system at headquarters that coordinates all calls, or each location may have a smaller system. ISDN PRI trunk lines connect to the public telephone network for off-net calls.

SIP Trunking offers an alternative to the ISDN PRI trunk lines for transporting voice traffic. A SIP trunk is part of the VoIP system and acts as the network connection to a remote service provider. That service provider handles termination of calls to the public phone system as needed. Since they terminate calls for many customers, per minute costs can be lower than ordering phone lines locally.

Some companies go even further and get all their telephone services from the cloud. All they have is individual SIP telephones or analog phones with adaptors connected to their company LAN. A private line connection or SIP trunk connects to what is called a virtual PBX system at the service provider. It handles all telephone switching, on-net and off. This system is ideally suited to “virtual” companies that don’t have a bricks and mortar presence. The employees are scattered over a wide geographical area. Thanks to the virtual PBX, they are interconnected just like they would be within a physical office building. Even the receptionist is virtual, routing incoming calls by voice or keypad requests.

Would a cloud networking approach help your company improve productivity while reducing costs? You can find out with a simple inquiry to an expert consultant regarding enterprise VoIP telephone services.

Voice And Data On One Line

Nearly all businesses today have a need for both telephone and broadband Internet service. Most businesses installed telephone first and Internet later. That’s led to a mix of line services to meet specific needs. Is there a better solution?

Today’s digital technology allows you to have both telephone service and broadband Internet access coming in on a single line. That often offers considerable cost savings over two separate services. But what about quality of service?

You might cringe at the thought of combined telephone and Internet if you’ve had a bad experience with VoIP over residential broadband. Usually it’s the phone service that suffers. Voices get garbled, you may hear an echo on the line, people start talking over each other with a delay in the speech, and calls can even be dropped. That’s what can happen when you just plug a VoIP phone or adaptor into a shared broadband service with uncontrolled bandwidth.

There are much better solutions available for business users. VoIP telephony can sound excellent and be as stable as traditional analog telephony. The trick is to carefully engineer the line to ensure adequate bandwidth, jitter, latency and voice packet priority.

A service called Integrated T1 does just this. A single T1 line with 1.5 Mbps dedicated bandwidth in both directions connects the business location to the service provider. There are no other users sharing this line. A specialized router called an Integrated Access Device converts analog telephony signals to digital packets. Those voice packets are assigned a portion of the line bandwidth to ensure they don’t get overwhelmed by data packets from Web sites and other Internet services. This bandwidth is assigned dynamically. As more phones are in use, more bandwidth is reserved for phone calls. When calls hang up, that bandwidth is reassigned for broadband Internet access.

Integrated T1 service works best for smaller businesses that need 6 to 12 phone lines plus modest broadband Internet service. It is possible to add more bandwidth as the business grows by bonding additional T1 lines.

Another service that combines voice and data on a single line service is called SIP Trunking. SIP is the signaling protocol used by enterprise VoIP telephone systems. You may already have a VoIP telephone system in your office. If so, you can get both voice and broadband Internet service over a SIP trunk. Like Integrated T1, SIP trunking manages quality of service to ensure that data and voice packets don’t interfere. SIP trunks, however, can have much higher bandwidth that T1 lines. Large SIP trunks can carry hundreds or even thousands of telephone calls.

Are Integrated T1 or SIP Trunking the right solution to give your company a substantial cost savings? Find out with a competitive service quote from Enterprise VoIP. You may be paying far more than you need to with your existing mix of telephone and broadband services.

Why Are VoIP and SIP Trunking So Popular?

If your old PBX system is getting long in the tooth and it’s time to start considering a replacement, you’ll do well to look into replacing that PBX with an IP PBX and those phone lines with a SIP Trunk.

Why are these new technologies catching on so fast when traditional telecom equipment and analog or ISDN phone lines work just fine? The answer is new features combined with cost savings while maintaining call quality.

You might be getting a headache right now, thinking about the capital investment and installation expense required to change out all those phone sets that are still getting the job done. Breathe easy. You don’t have to swap out any of your old phones unless you want to.

There are good reasons why you might like a new VoIP SIP phone. For one thing, they plug right into your computer network and don’t need separate telephone wiring of their own. You manage them like any other device on the network. Since a SIP phone can plug into any network jack just like a PC, it’s much easier to manage moves, adds and changes. You want to move to a different office? No problem. Just take your phone with you and plug it in to the network jack in the new office. The phone still has its own MAC address that identifies it as yours, so it doesn’t matter where on the network it sits.

But what about the old phones you want to keep? Just connect their phone wires to your new IP PBX. You’ll need to order interface cards with FSX ports to make the connections, but the IP PBX doesn’t mind a bit. You can even have a mix of SIP phones connected to your LAN and analog phones connected to FSX ports. The IP PBX will treat them all as individual telephones. Of course, the SIP phones may have extra features like displays or the ability to coordinate with computer terminals, but they’re still telephones.

By the way, you don’t necessarily need to have a PBX system on your premises anymore. VoIP has opened the door to hosted PBX, where the call switching hardware is located at an offsite supplier who provides telephone services at an attractive price. It’s a way to avoid the often hefty capital investment required for a new in-house IP PBX system.

VoIP telephony has become popular in business environments with lots of phones, primarily because of the ability to converge the LAN network to support voice as well as data. That makes it possible to keep the phone system truly off the public network for all locations that are reached by the corporate LAN. It’s only when you need to talk to outside parties that you need public phone lines. Or do you?

Yes, you do. But you don’t have to provide those lines yourself. What a SIP trunk does is extend your internal network to a service provider who then connects to the public phone system. Economy of scale generally means that telephone calls over a SIP trunking service are less expensive that terminating them yourself to analog phone lines or ISDN PRI trunks connected to the phone company. SIP trunking services also generally provide dedicated Internet service over the same SIP trunk. After all, it is just a network extension. As long as quality of service is maintained, you can get your telephone and Internet services from the same provider over a single SIP trunk and realize a cost savings.

Are you interested in exploring the expanded performance and cost savings available with VoIP and SIP Trunking services? You may be surprised at what you can get for much less than you are paying now. Enter a quick Enterprise VoIP quote request now with a brief description of your needs and you’ll get a fast response and personalized service.

T1 Phone Lines Offer More For Less

Once your business gets big enough that the telephone bill is a significant part of your monthly expenses, you may be ready for a higher volume, lower cost service. That's especially true if you have started a dedicated contact center for your customers or have grown to a dozen or more outside lines.

The service you'll be interested in is called a T1 telephone line. A T1 "line" is a digital telephone trunk as opposed to a single telephone line. What trunk means is a group of phone lines all bundled electronically into a single line. If you order your phone lines one at a time, as most growing companies do, you'll get individual analog lines with local dial tone and perhaps long distance service. Each line is independent of the others. You select the line you want with a multi-line phone or key telephone system. Or, your PBX system will automatically pick one for you.

T1 telephone lines come bundled up to 23 or 24 to a T1 line. Each line is still independent and can be configured for local and/or long distance service, incoming or outgoing or both, depending on your needs. What T1 telephone service does is offer a volume discount compared to just adding more and more analog phone lines.

Do T1 lines connect to your phones the same as conventional analog phone lines? Not exactly. You need something to perform the conversion between analog and digital formats. If all you want to do is consolidate a bunch of analog phone lines that feed a bunch of analog handsets, a device called a "channel bank" will do the job for you. The T1 line feeds into one side of the channel bank and up to 24 individual phone lines come out the other side.

Most of the time, if you have a dozen or more phone lines you probably have a PBX telephone system in-house. The PBX or the newer IP PBX systems have gotten small and inexpensive compared to the closet full of equipment they used to be. Many newer systems come with a T1 line interface or can be ordered with that configuration. If your existing PBX system doesn't have T1 line capability, you can usually order a plug-in card that will make the connection.

There's something else you need to know about T1 phone lines. There are two types. The original configuration is a channelized T1 line with 24 individual channels, one to transport each telephone line. A newer arrangement is the T1 PRI or ISDN PRI. PRI stands for Primary Rate Interface. This is the most popular version of T1 phone service because it offers up to 23 telephone lines plus Caller ID information and faster call switching. Most PBX and IP PBX phone systems can handle T1 PRI as well as conventional channelized T1 lines.

Because of their economy of scale in combining multiple phone lines into a single digital trunk, T1 phone lines can offer you more capability for less money. How much more for how much less? That depends on how you want your service configured. There are often limited time special offers from competitive carriers that can make the line lease cost even more attractive. Find out how much you can benefit from the most competitive offers on T1 phone lines now.