Hosted Voice Goes Mobile

There’s a major migration in progress right now. Can you guess what it is? If you answered “to the cloud,” you’d be right, of course. If you answered “PBX to the cloud,” you’d have read my mind. Companies are abandoning their PBX telephone systems in favor of cloud communications systems. You may know these as hosted PBX or hosted VoIP. Now, that also includes mobile.

Megapath’s Hosted Voice Mobile gives you the ability to have one-number VoIP calling from your desk phone, desktop computer or smartphone. The key is the one-number capability. Do you have one of those business cards with half a dozen different phone numbers? I’ll bet that confuses your customers and prospects. Hey, what are you supposed to do. You can’t be in the office all the time. Sometimes you are at your desk, sometimes you are out and about, the rest of the time you are at home. If a really important call comes in you aren’t about to quibble that you are “off duty” at home.

Legacy approaches to solving this problem include having a calling service that will try to locate you, carrying a pager (very legacy), remembering to forward to your phones, one by one, when you make a move, having a secretary take messages for you and leave them on your desk or just relying on voice mail that you check all the time. None of these approaches has been ideal, but they sure beat missing a critical communication.

This is where cloud technology shines. Location doesn’t mean a thing to the cloud, because it covers all locations. With cloud services you can be anywhere and access your account in the cloud using whatever compatible device you happen to have handy. With Hosted Voice Mobile, you use an easy-to-manage Web portal that controls call routing using a single VoIP number. That’s right. You hand out one number and know that you’ll get calls to that number no matter where you happen to be.

Hosted PBX systems relieve you of the responsibility to maintain a small telephone switching system in your back room. This function moves to a much larger platform at your cloud service provider. All you have in-house are IP phones, a voice gateway that delivers telephone services, plus your mobile smartphones. The hosted system contains the functionality for such features as Find Me / Follow Me and Visual Voicemail. Now that includes your smartphone as well as your desk phone.

Megapath goes beyond some of the basic hosted PBX services to include features like HD voice for crystal clear call quality, free domestic calling that includes long distance and the ability to replicate key telephone systems.

What’s a key system? If you have a phone system that has individual buttons for all the outside phone lines, you have a key system. Key phones have lights next to each line switch so you know when the line is busy. If you want to make an outgoing call, you select an unused line. If you want to join a conversation in progress, you push the button for that line and you are conferenced in.

PBX telephone systems differ from key systems in that the PBX manages the outside lines. You don’t have the ability to pick a line and probably don’t even know how many lines there are. They are placed in a pool and assigned as needed. That’s when an incoming call comes into the system, or someone requests an outside line by dialing a number, usually “9.”

Are you feeling constrained by the limitations of your present phone system or are experiencing outages that are time consuming and expensive? Before you get a loan to buy yet another in-house phone system, check out the options available with one of the newer hosted VoIP systems. You’ll avoid large capital investments, pay per seat per month, and gain valuable features such as mobile integration that you don’t have now. Compare competitive cloud hosted communications systems with what you have now and see what you’ve been missing.

PRI Phone Line Connections

Traditional analog business phone lines are useful in very small retail and office locations and any business where just a few outside lines are all you need. Once you accumulate more than half a dozen, it’s time to look at a telephone trunk like option like ISDN PRI.

ISDN PRI stands for Integrated Services Digital Network Primary Rate Interface. Now you know why they abbreviate it. ISDN is a set of standards for how to transmit phone calls digitally on ordinary telephone wire. PRI is the larger of two major options. The other, BRI or Basic Rate Interface, provides two telephone lines, one telephone and one 64 Kbps data line, or a 128 Kbps data line. It’s mostly used for low speed data connections or to transmit high quality audio for broadcast and production.

PRI is the business telephone trunk service that is highly popular for use with PBX phone systems. PRI is transmitted on a T1 line using two twisted copper pair. Chances are you are already familiar with T1 lines for dedicated Internet access at 1.5 Mbps. ISDN PRI, also called T1 PRI, uses the same T1 line technology. In fact, T1 lines were originally designed to transport telephone conversations in bulk between telco switching offices.

What do you get with ISDN PRI service? A single trunk can support up to 23 separate phone conversations, each in its own time division multiplexed channel. Think of these as the equivalent of 23 outside lines. Each line can be set up for local, long distance, incoming only, outgoing only, toll free or some combination. There are actually 24 channels on the T1 line. The last one is reserved for switching signals to support the other 23 plus data such as Caller ID.

ISDN PRI lines almost always plug into an interface card made especially for this purpose. There’s at least one in most PBX phone systems. Some have four or more ISDN PRI connectors so that you can add dozens of outside lines if your operation is large enough to need them. Call centers are big users of ISDN PRI, as are large business offices.

PRI pricing has been getting better over the years, following the declining cost of T1 lines. A few years ago, PRI became more cost effective when you exceeded 10 or 12 outside phone lines. Today, that number is more like 6 or 10 lines, depending on where you are located.

Other than analog phone lines, the direct competitor to ISDN PRI is SIP Trunking. PRI is a traditional telephone technology that connects your PBX system to the public switched telephone network. SIP Trunking is a packet based technology originally designed to support enterprise VoIP telephone systems. SIP Trunks connect directly to converged networks for enterprise VoIP support and can supply both phone and Internet service for smaller companies. SIP Trunks can also be ordered with analog, IP or PRI handoffs to connect to any PBX telephone system.

What type of telephone trunk line is best for your particular situation? Consider the interfaces you have available and get competitive prices and availability for business telephone lines and trunks to make a good decision.