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.

Achieving Call Quality Momentum With Cloud Communications

By: John Shepler

Are you frustrated with your decades old in-house phone system that is getting more obsolete by the minute? Or, do you have a horror story that revolves around moving to VoIP only to find the reliability bad and the call quality worse? It’s time you gained some momentum with a superior cloud communications solution… like one from Momentum. Have a look….


If you are new to IP based voice communication, you may not be aware of the pitfalls that can ruin a good network voice system or the solutions that are just bad to begin with. This is where you need a “best of breed” vendor to ensure your success.

There are a couple of competing approaches to enterprise level VoIP. The first is to have the system located and operated in-house. You treat it as part of the IT infrastructure. That’s different from traditional approaches that have kept the telephone network and IT network forever separate.

Some companies only go so far as to replace their T1 telephone lines or ISDN PRI trunks with SIP trunks in order to get a better deal from a competitive service provider. Nothing changes in-house other than a new way to connecting to the phone company.

While this is the least amount of upset to the status quo, it does nothing to modernize your phone system. You gain none of the advanced calling features that VoIP systems have to offer. For that, you need to combine voice and data.

Enterprise VoIP, as opposed to a home office or small office with one or two phones, involves making the IT network also your phone network. You can add adaptors to your current analog phones so they connect to Ethernet, but you’re probably better off upgrading to IP telephones that have the network interface built-in plus all sorts of other capabilities.

Once you get all the phones on your LAN and off the phone wiring, you reach another fork in the road. Do you buy an in-house IP PBX system and continue to run everything yourself, or do you offload the switching system and connections to the public phone system to a cloud vendor?

Cloud communication is becoming a very attractive option. You avoid the capital investment of upgrading your in-house system and the ongoing maintenance costs. You also gain the ability to include remote workers in the system so you can communicate the same way no matter where you happen to be. Being tied to a desk, especially by a phone cord, can damage both your flexibility and productivity.

Momentum, the service provider, has some very attractive pluses in cloud communications. For one thing, they offer measurable call quality. Getting network voice right can be a tricky prospect and your customers will know if your phone system degrades. You also gain mobility, cloud disaster recovery and call center features. Best of all, you may find that your next phone system upgrade can save rather than cost you money.

Is your business ready to tap the advantages of cloud hosted communications? If so, find out what Momentum and other top tier providers have to offer. You may be surprised at what you can get for the same or less than you spend now.

MPLS Networks Simplified

Have you been hearing a lot of buzz about MPLS networks lately but not exactly sure just what is a MPLS network and how it differs from other networks? Here’s the really simplified lowdown on MPLS technology in less than 3 minutes...


So, why go to all the trouble to set up a “bar coding technology” when IP networks are so prolific? IP works great within your organization where you have complete control of the network. You can manage the traffic, add and subtract resources, and set-up class of service mechanisms to ensure that time sensitive traffic like VoIP or video conferencing isn’t crushed by big data file transfers or backup and restore processes.

Not so on the Internet. Every packet gets the same handling as every other packet. The fault tolerant features of Internet technology pretty much ensure that if packets can’t take one particular path, they can find another more round about way to get to their destination. This is great for TCP/IP applications like file transfers, but deadly for two-way voice and video. No class of service distinctions combined with indeterminate routing wreak havoc in the form of latency and jitter.

This is where MPLS shines. There are no public MPLS networks like the public Internet. They are all owned and operated by particular service providers on a fee basis. You sign up for the MPLS network that you want to use and the provider makes sure that you get first class service.

How is that done? Remember those “bar code” tags? The tags have the extra information about class of service and routing that tell the network how to handle each packet. There is no need for equipment on the network to examine IP or other protocol headers. The tag is all the tag switches or routers need to handle the traffic.

The result of this tagging process is that packets are handled differently depending on their needs. Voice and video conferencing traffic gets priority. Non-critical file transfers get a lower priority. Most of the time, congestion, latency and jitter are not a problem. Since the service provider knows everyone using the network, adequate resources can be provisioned to ensure that traffic from one customer doesn’t interfere with traffic from any other.

There’s another benefit to this tagging technology. It completely frustrates anyone trying to spy on the network traffic using IP tools. They won’t work because the network isn’t running the Internet Protocol. It just transports IP packets from point A to point B. Non-IP traffic gets the same treatment. That’s why MPLS means multi-protocol label switching. Any protocol can be accommodated and all have enhanced security from label switching technology and no public access. MPLS networks are often referred to as MPLS VPN or virtually private network.

Today’s MPLS networks have regional, national and international service footprints. They are easily accessed from just about anywhere using copper wireline or fiber optic connections. Pricing is very attractive, even when you only want to connect two far-flung locations. For multiple sites that need to communicate, MPLS is the go-to technology today.

Does an MPLS network service make sense for your WAN communication needs? Get competitive pricing and features for MPLS networks that support your business needs.

MegaPath Puts Your Complete Office In The Cloud

You’ve been interested in cloud services, but it seems like ordering all those different services and then getting them to work together is more grief than just keeping everything separate. Now there’s a new solution that bundles all the IT services you need to run a small business at bargain pricing.

The thing about smaller businesses is that they don’t have or want to pay for enterprise level technology. The big VoIP phone systems and on-site data centers are ridiculous expenses for companies that only have a few or a few dozen telephones and computers. You may think that the big cost savings are only available through economy of scale. That used to be true, but hosted solutions have changed all that. You can get better pricing, more features and better performance even in a small retail store or professional office.

The magic behind this is called hosting. You might think of hosting as something that powers your website. Up till recently, that’s all that hosting was about. The big change underway is to use the same principles that work for website hosting and apply them to telephone, email, security, data backup and more.

MegaPath Complete Office Solutions bundles scalable voice, data and hosted IT solutions in a package that is designed to increase productivity and save you money. They can do that because MegaPath is a major competitive carrier and provider of IT services. They have massive data centers of their own and can provide you both the hosted services and the business bandwidth to make them work.

That’s important because you need to get to your services in the cloud. If all you have is an unreliable Internet connection or too-small bandwidth line service, even the best hosted services will fail. Get your bandwidth and cloud from the same reliable provider and you’ll have an ally to ensure it all works together optimally.

Here’s what Complete Office Solutions includes. First, you get a hosted voice solution as your business telephone service. Hosted voice means that you no longer have a key telephone PBX system to maintain. All of the switching, including in-house, local and long distance calls are handled by the hosted switching equipment in the cloud. You still have telephones, but they are IP telephones that connect to your company network, not to the telephone company. Your network connection is extended to MegaPath using their bandwidth solutions that are carefully managed to ensure that voice quality is maintained.

By the way, the new telephone sets you’ll need are included in your service price. There is no capital investment required. You pay a very reasonable price per seat per month for everything. You’ll have free use of either of two sophisticated office phones, the Cisco SPA 303G or the Polycom SoundPoint IP 335. These phone give you advanced calling features such as unlimited national calling, call forwarding, call waiting, caller ID, call transfer find me / follow me, HD voice, voicemail and options that include hunt groups, auto attendant and analog faxing.

By the way, this hosted system is easily scalable. That means that you can add seats and even other business locations without the expense and upset of ripping out equipment and installing something with more capacity. All the capacity you’ll ever need is right there in the cloud. All you add is more seats as you need them, any only pay for what you are using.

Beyond business telephone, you’ll have broadband access, 5GB of initial data backup and hosted Exchange email. Hosted SharePoint for collaboration is also available as an optional service. The bundle includes free equipment and free installation. It’s everything you need for a modern business.

Are you ready for a more modern and more integrated office technology solution without the pain of capital investment or the need to get everything working yourself? You may be ready for a cloud hosted business communications solution available on a pay as you go basis. It’s the new way to get the IT and telephony services you need to run your business.

How Does a VoIP Call Work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOHO VoIP Phone Service With Two Lines at $8.33/mo

Do you need business telephone service for your small office or home office and want it at bargain prices? Would you just like to get a great deal on home phone service with two lines so two people can make calls at the same time? Would you find a price of $8.33 a month attractive?

How is a deal like this even possible considering what the phone company dings you now for your landline service? The trick is to get your service from a competitive service provider with advanced technology and aggressive pricing. It’s too expensive for competitive telephone service providers to lease local phone lines anymore, so the answer is to use an alternative network to make the connection. This network happens to be the broadband service that you already have installed in your home or small business. Your broadband service can double as a phone line as well as a computer line.

This is the heart of VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. It’s also called broadband phone or network voice. You don’t have to buy a new telephone. You can use a regular landline phone for VoIP service by plugging it into an interface called an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA). Phone Power, one of the most advanced providers of VoIP phone service for home and small business users, includes an adapter with their VoIP service. What’s special about this one is that it lets you plug in two telephones instead of just one.

Here’s how this works. Plug two separate phones into the 2-line adapter. These can be single handset phone or those cordless phones with base stations and multiple handsets. Someone dials out on line 1 and makes their call. Meanwhile you want to make a call too. OK. Just pick up the second phone, get dial tone and make your call. You are both talking at once. You can also receive two separate phone calls. The only caveat is that you still have only one telephone number. The magic of technology has created a cloned second line.

Your service also includes lots of other desirable features. First, you get free calling to the US and Canada. There is no distinction between local and long distance calling. The one exception is international calls that have extra charges. Even so, you get an hour of free international calling every month. For most people, this is like having all the international long distance they really need.

Another 45+ free premium calling features are also included with your hosted VoIP service. These include the usuals like voicemail, Enhanced 911, 3 way conference calling, call forwarding, call waiting, call hold, incoming Caller ID with name, speed dial and the ability to keep your current telephone number.

Some of the more advanced features include voicemail-to-email viewer that lets you view and listen to your voice mails through your online account, a fax catcher that lets incoming faxes go to voice mail where they’ll be collected as a file you can open and print through your online portal, and an iPhone app. This free application, available on the iPhone App Store, lets you take your Phone Power VoIP phone service with you on the go. You’ll never miss an important call just because you are near the wrong phone.

So, how about this $8.33 per month pricing? It’s for real, but you need to buy a year’s phone service in advance. With that you get a second year’s service free, which averages out to $8.33 a month. Too much commitment? Get a 24 month term contract and pay $14.95 a month, $16.95 for a 12 month term, or go month to month for just $19.95 a month. Even this rate is probably lower than what you pay the phone company now or what some nationally advertised VoIP services dare to charge. It’s an amazing deal for an amazing suite of features.

Are you looking for new or better telephone service? If enterprise VoIP solutions are way more that you need or care to pay for, consider this feature rich VoIP phone service available at a bargain price.

Best VoIP Providers For Business

VoIP has been transforming the telecom industry for years now. As a business owner or manager you may be wondering if you are missing out on something important by sticking with your tried and true analog telephone service. Does VoIP really work? Can it really save a business money?

Yes, indeed, VoIP technology is for real. It is sometimes called “network voice,” a term that describes what the technology is all about. The idea is that your company computer network can carry telephone conversations as an application if they are compatible with other network equipment. This is possible when telephones are turned into network peripherals called IP telephones or SIP telephones.

This sounds like a clever tech trick, but just where does the cost savings come in? For VoIP to make any difference, you need to be able to get rid of your old telephone wiring, PBX system and analog lines. Then the phones and the computers share the remaining company LAN and broadband connection to the outside world.

Here’s where it gets tricky. All VoIP isn’t the same. Voice and data packets might look similar, but they have very different needs. Voice is a real time streaming service. Anything that interferes with the smooth and continuous transfer of packets from one phone to another without delay is going to make the conversation sound crummy. Network congestion, latency and packet loss that doesn’t faze data transfers will destroy phone calls. There is no plug-and-play for VoIP. The network, including any outside telecom lines, have to be specially set up to support voice services or they won’t work very well.

The best VoIP providers take measures to insure that your phone service works as well as it does now or even better. In general, this means that you need a private line connecting you to your service provider. That line must be specially conditioned so that voice packets have priority over data packets. You won’t notice fractions of a second delays in data downloads, but you sure will if they affect the phone calls. Voice needs a guarantee of bandwidth, latency, jitter and congestion so it can work perfectly.

For most companies, the ideal approach is to let your VoIP service provider also be your bandwidth provider... at least for any lines transporting VoIP phone calls. This way you can be sure that those lines will be optimized for best VoIP performance. This is especially important for smaller companies that will save money by using a single integrated T1 line or SIP trunk to provide both dedicated Internet access and VoIP telephone service.

Larger companies may have dedicated SIP trunks that transport only phone conversations. Like ISDN PRI, each SIP trunk can transport a certain number of calls within its bandwidth capacity. How many simultaneous calls depend on the CODEC (Coder/Decoder) that does the conversion between analog and digital. The universal standard is G.711 which is the same standard used in T1 telephone and ISDN PRI. Other codecs offer HD voice that is more understandable than standard telephone audio or they use less bandwidth to cram more conversations per trunk. Be careful here, though, the lowest bandwidth CODECS gain their efficiency at the expense of voice quality.

Perhaps the most popular business VoIP service right now is called hosted VoIP, hosted PBX or telephony in the cloud. You have only SIP telephones in-house. All switching and connections to outside lines is done at the service provider. Cost savings of 60% or more are being promoted for this type of service.

There are other arrangements you may also be interested in. Some VoIP companies offer an “analog handoff” so you can use regular telephone sets with VoIP service. You don’t get as many features with this hybrid arrangement, but you may save the cost of upgrading all your phones and wiring. Note: Some VoIP providers may include new SIP phones with your service agreement to sweeten the deal. That can make the upgrade well worth your while.

Still other VoIP providers work with your in-house PBX telephone system and only replace the trunk lines that would otherwise go to the local telephone company or competitive carrier. If you are happy with your current phone system but just want the opportunity to save on your monthly phone bill, this can be a good solution. When it comes time to replace or upgrade your PBX, you can review the situation and see if going with a hosted PBX makes more sense than paying for a new system.

Even if you only have a single telephone or a few desk phones in your company, you may be able to save substantially with service from one of the best VoIP providers for business. Get competitive quotes and features now.

What XO’s 1,000,000 VoIP Customers Predicts

XO Communications, a major competitive telecom carrier, recently achieved the milestone of reaching 1,000,000 business VoIP end users.



What should be noted is that it came as a surprise, even to XO, that the millionth customer would arrive in only 5 years. You may have raised an eyebrow, too, if you’ve been struggling with the decision on whether or not to embrace enterprise VoIP technology. We’ve all been on calls with someone using a poorly implemented VoIP solution and have been repelled by the distortion, voice clipping, noise modulation and even dropped calls of VoIP done badly. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. After all, a million business customers must know something, right?

What they know is that professional grade communications solutions are carefully engineered to accommodate the needs of the technology. For instance, XO’s IP Flex service is implemented over a T1 line or similar commercial bandwidth connection. Terminal equipment on both ends ensures that voice packets have the bandwidth, latency, and jitter characteristics they need to travel unscathed from user to service provider. They are protected from interference by data transfers by giving voice priority over data. The circuit is engineered to ensure that you can have all the telephone calls you need in progress simultaneously and still have adequate bandwidth for high speed Internet service on the same line.

The secret to enterprise VoIP is in careful control of the network. That network must include your converged LAN plus the link to your telephone and Internet service provider. SIP Trunking, a larger scale version of integrated voice and data lines, even allows you to include multiple business locations on the same outgoing phone lines. Internal calls stay on your network and avoid telco toll charges completely.

There is a future to telecommunications services, and the million XO VoIP customers shows that we are moving to an IP-centric business environment faster than most of us realize. Those who have made the switch are now enjoying the twin benefits of added services and lower costs.

Is your business, large or small, looking at ways to save on your monthly telecom expenses while maintaining quality of service? If so, then get competitive quotes on Enterprise VoIP Voice and Data Services.

Fractional ISDN PRI For Telephone Savings

For high performance business telephone usage, it’s hard to beat ISDN PRI. You get 23 digitized phone lines, fast out-of-band call switching, and Caller ID for your PBX phone system. It’s all delivered on a single line service that’s a lot cheaper than a collection of individual analog telephone lines. So what could be better?

How about the same quality and performance for smaller phone systems? How about, say, half-a-PRI with a substantial cost savings?

Sure, why not?

Honestly, not every business needs 23 outside lines. In fact, you have to be a fairly large operation or a specialized business like a call center to require that much capacity. But there are lots and lots of businesses that do need a dozen or so phone lines for sales operations or customer service. For those businesses there is Fractional ISDN PRI.

In the United States, ISDN PRI is delivered on a T1 line. Each T1 line has 24 channels. ISDN PRI uses 23 channels for phone conversations, 1 per channel, and the last channel for signaling and information. If you’ve ordered a T1 line for dedicated Internet access or point to point connection to another facility, you know that you don’t always have to take the full line capacity. You can generally order fractional T1 service and pay somewhat less for a smaller bandwidth.

You can do the same thing with an ISDN PRI, also called a T1 PRI. There’s no need to order and configure all 23 phone channels if you don’t need that many. The T1 line will always have this capability available, but you may be able to order 6, 12, 18 or some other number of active lines. Configure them as any combination of incoming, outgoing, local, long distance or toll free. The monthly price you pay will be based on how many lines you set up and how much you use them.

You should also known that there is a related service called Integrated T1 that combines telephone and Internet data on a single line. It has special equipment so that voice and data never interfere. Basically, some of the T1 channels are assigned as telephone lines and the rest are allocated to Internet data service. If all you need is 6 to 12 phone lines plus broadband Internet access, Integrated T1 service may be your best cost solution.

Which telecom service is best for your company: ISDN PRI, Fractional ISDN PRI, or Integrated T1 service? Why not compare costs from multiple providers and then decide? Go ahead, the process is automated and takes just a few minutes. Expert consultants are available free of charge to help you decide or talk over your business requirements.

To VoIP or Not to VoIP

Businesses are always looking for ways to save money. With the economy as soft as it is, most business managers and owners are combing their expense reports for anything that looks hopeful. The phone bill often sticks out like a sore thumb. All that money out the door every month? Isn't there a way to get the same value but spend less?

There probably is, but you're going to have to look closely. The best approach is going to depend on what you need and what you have invested.

Let's take a look at VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. VoIP is touted as an alternative telephone service, but it probably should be called an alternative telephone system. What's the difference? Ultimately, most telephone calls still traverse the Public Switched Telephone Network. The PSTN is an analog and TDM based technology that uses circuit switched principles. VoIP, sometimes called network voice, is a packet switched protocol designed to share networks designed for computer communications.

The mismatch in computer and telephone technologies sometimes comes home to roost in low-end VoIP phone services that rely on sharing Cable broadband or DSL lines to save money. The savings comes from bypassing telephone company owned wiring and switches. Your calls go over the Internet to a service provider who provides the connection to the PSTN for all its subscribers. The Achilles heel of this arrangement is that shared low cost Internet connections often vary greatly in available bandwidth and can suffer from large amounts latency, jitter and dropped packets. Without proper QoS (Quality of Service) controls, computers on the same connection can hog all the bandwidth, leaving nothing for your phone calls.

Can you really afford garbled voice quality, clipped conversations and dropped calls? The telephone is often the face of your business to your customer. For a single line or a few phones, you are probably best off getting the best competitive price on conventional phone service.

Where VoIP can really offer advantages is when you create a phone system for your own use. Properly engineered corporate networks can handle the convergence of voice and data packets on a single LAN. Your cost savings come from managing a single network instead of two completely different technologies, the fact that VoIP or SIP phones have their own addresses and don't care about what wall jack they're plugged into, a greater variety and lower cost options for IP based PBX phone systems, and advanced features for fixed/mobile convergence and computer/telephone integration.

As you probably have guessed, all of these advantages require a substantial investment before you start seeing any payoff. But what if your traditional PBX or Key telephone system is doing a good job and there's no reason to replace it? There's no need to. Enterprise VoIP works best in greenfield installations or when a forklift upgrade of an older system is required due to capacity limitations, obsolescence or inability to provide the needed features.

You can still save money without having to replace any of your existing company phone system. Competitive service providers can offer you better deals on T1 telephone, ISDN PRI, or Integrated voice and data service. The change to a lower cost provider can be invisible to your phone users, but still result in big monthly savings on the bottom line.

To VoIP or not to VoIP? That is the question. For some help in finding the answer, let our team of telecom service experts review your particular needs and recommend options that will save you the most money.

VoIP Without The Internet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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