Business Phone Goes Hosted

Business telephone service has expanded over the years, from the single line analog POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) to multi-line PBX systems that handle hundreds and thousands of phone sets. What’s the next logical development? Could it be even larger and more sophisticated in-house PBX systems? No, just the opposite. The PBX is moving out as business phone service goes hosted.

Hosted business phone is another term for telephone switching in the cloud. Hosted means that a service provider hosts your telephone service on their equipment. The responsibility for running the PBX system and providing the lines to the public telephone system are effectively transferred from your company to your service provider’s.

Why would you want to go the hosted route? It generally boils down to finances and flexibility. The first financial advantage is that you no longer have to buy expensive capital equipment and provide a space for it in your building. This is seldom a one time allocation. Every so many years you find that your equipment has become obsolete and too expensive to maintain or it can no longer keep up with the demands placed on it. You need a newer and likely larger system to replace it. That process is called a “fork lift upgrade” because it you can’t often salvage any of the existing equipment. A fork lift truck drives in and hauls out the old PBX system. It then drives back in to deliver the new replacement.

Granted, smaller PBX systems that support branch offices or retail locations may be something you can pick up and carry yourself. Even so, the “fork lift” metaphor applies. It’s out with the old and in with the new. Hopefully you can pay off the old system before it’s time to replace it.

With a hosted PBX system, there are phones but there is no PBX or telephone switching system in-house. That lets you avoid a major capital expense and also the guessing game of trying to predict how much capacity you’ll need during the lifetime of that system. If you guess low, you’ll be replacing it while it still works just fine. If you guess high, you’ll pay for capacity that you never use. Either way, it’s hard to know the future well enough to pick just the right size PBX.

The other financial advantage is that PBX phone systems cost more than just the purchase price. Every time to you to do a “move, add or change” with your telephones, somebody has to do some rewiring and change some programming in the system. That could be a dedicated staff member who is the telephone manager full or part time. Otherwise it is a contractor known as a VAR for Value Added Reseller. Either way, there’s ongoing expense to run the system and keep up with the changes.

How do hosted business phone systems save you all that grief and expense? The service provider has a much larger shared PBX system and the staff to run it 24/7. They keep up with day to day maintenance and upgrades. Because this system is so large, it can accommodate many customers and easily expand to meet your changing needs. That’s the principle behind the cloud. You don’t have to worry about all the hardware, software and personnel needed to keep the phone system running. The service provider specializes in this and handles it for you.

What’s available in the way of hosted phone services? There are a number of cloud communications providers who offer this capability. They generally provide the service on a “per seat” per month basis. Each phone has internal, local and long distance switching capability included. Most of the time its a single price for all calling other than international and for all the features. Some providers can include your mobile phones so that they are part of the PBX capabilities. Some providers even include the physical phones. These are IP Telephones than plug right into your company LAN. You connect to the provider with a network connection called a SIP Trunk.

Can hosted business phone make sense for your company? There are solutions for every business from the smallest retailer to the largest corporation. Get prices and features for competing hosted PBX service providers now and see if you can save both money and effort.

Virtual Office Hosted Telecommunications at Half Price

If you want to upgrade your business telephone system but wince at the cost of buying a PBX system and trying to make it work for your situation, hosted telecommunications could be your solution. Even better, Packet8 business services is now offering their Virtual Office solution at half price for a limited time.

Half off, a 50% discount, sure sounds good. But just what is hosted telecommunications and what does a Virtual Office do that regular telephone service doesn't?

Basically, there are two ways to run a business phone system that consists of more than a couple phones. You can buy the equipment that operates your phones and hire the people to set it up and make changes as they are needed. Or you can have a company that specializes in this "host" the equipment and services at their location. All you need then is to put telephone handsets wherever you want them.

Packet 8 Virtual Office is a hosted telecommunications solution. They have the PBX (Private Branch Exchange) equipment at their headquarters. In this case, it's an iPBX or Internet protocol PBX system because they are leveraging the connectivity of the Internet to make the connections. This is a VoIP telephone system, but without the need to buy and manage network voice equipment at your location.

The Virtual Office is more than just a brand name. It also hints at the difference between this arrangement and a typical business phone system. You can locate your handsets wherever you need them and they don't even have to be in the same building, town or even country. That's right, you can set up a virtual company where your colleagues are all over the world. Yet to outside callers it appears that you are all in one big office.

In fact, to people within your organization it will seem like you are all on the same phone system in one location. You can dial by extension number and not worry where those extensions are physically located. You'll park calls, forward and transfer them at will. There's even a conference bridge included so you can host your own conference calls beyond 3 way calling. Virtual Office integrates with Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook to support your sales and CRM activities.

There's a lot more to this system, so you'll want to learn more about Packet 8 Virtual Office. If you choose to order Virtual Office Unlimited VoIP service with a new IP phone (model 53i, 55i or 57i) and you're a new Packet8 customer, you'll need to enter promo code UEIP25 when going through the checkout process to get the limited time special offer of $24.95 per month instead of the standard subscription rate of $49.99 a month for a full 12 months on a one-year contract. Yes it's really half price, but only from now until December 31, 2008.