How to Get Your Business Phones For Free

You’d like to update your phone system, but the cost is hard to justify. After all, you can still receive and make calls just fine. What you are missing out on are all the cool features that the more advanced phones have to offer. You may also be stuck with a phone system that doesn’t work with your wireless phones and other mobile device. What do you do? Sit and watch as your competitors gain productivity advantages?

Would you be surprised to learn that you can easily afford all those up to date phone features and put new high tech phones on every desk? Would you be more surprised to find out that you won’t have to invest a penny of your own money to make this upgrade?

It’s hard to believe, but true. The secret is a change in business model from owning everything to paying for what you actually use by the month. This is the power of cloud based communications.

The big technical advance that makes telephony in the cloud a winner is getting the telephones on the data network and off their own proprietary network. There are a couple of key reasons this better both technically and financially.

The technical reason is that LAN and WAN networks have far more bandwidth available than common telco channels. These include traditional analog business lines and multiplexed calls over ISDN PRI digital trunks. Both are good for something like 64 Kbps or less. No problem for voice conversations that are limited to less than 4 KHz. Also no problem for low speed data like Caller ID or dial-up modem service. Now compare this to network connections that start at 1.5 Mbps (T1) and go up to 1,000 Mbps (GigE) and beyond. This opens the door to transport dozens or hundreds of simultaneous calls on one trunk and enabling other features like HD voice for higher call quality.

In fact, there is so much bandwidth available that you can use the same WAN network connection to transport both telephone and Internet data over a single trunk line.

But, wait, aren’t there call quality issues when you send phone calls over the Internet? The trick is not to let the phone calls themselves touch the Internet. Broadband Internet and telephone calls are combined at the provider and then separated at the user location. The combination process uses the same line, but keeps voice and data from interfering. This is done by giving voice packets priority status, something you can’t do on the Internet.

You get higher bandwidth for more call capacity and both broadband and telephone service on a single network line. This is part of the cost savings. More comes from being able to select your provider from many competing cloud communications providers. What a lot of people don’t realize is that analog copper telephone lines are owned by the local phone company. Network connections can go anywhere and aren’t owned by the local telcos.

The last piece of the puzzle is moving the call switching system from the telephone company or a back room in your building to the cloud. Cloud hosted PBX systems have the economy of scale and spread the cost over many customers. Since the hosted PBX provider specializes in this service, these systems are kept up to date with the latest feature sets.

So how do you get free phones? Some, but not all, cloud communications providers include new IP desk telephones as part of your monthly service fee. This allows them to optimize their systems for particular phone models, buy in quantity, and ship you brand new telephones to replace the old ones you have now. If staff up and need more phones, they care shipped to you ready to plug into your network.

Would you like to upgrade your current business phone system without having to make a capital investment? Are providers offering free phones more cost effective than those that don’t? The way to find out is to get competitive quotes for a variety of hosted PBX service providers and see what best meets your needs.

Telecom Cost Savings Strategies

Every company is scouring the books for potential cost savings these days. How about your telecom expenses. Do you think there is any potential for savings there? I’ll bet there is.

First thing you need to do is collect those monthly bills and take a close look. For starters, just pick last month’s bill. What are all those line items that you are paying for? You need to know what each item is and why you have it.

In a larger organization, you can easily drown in the detail of every long distance phone call. I’d suggest just a quick scan to see if what sticks out like a sore thumb. Are a few users running up bills that are ten times everybody else’s? Do they have jobs where you’d expect that?

Especially be on the outlook for services that were ordered a long time ago but aren’t being used anymore. Do you have a special FAX line with no FAX machine attached? Are there a dozen phone lines coming into a building that has only a hand full of employees? How about dedicated point to point lines that link to locations you don’t even own or lease anymore? Cell phones that are sitting in drawers unused but still activated? All of these things are candidates to cancel immediately.

Highlight the rest of your telecom line services and how much you are paying for them. Generally data lines have a fixed cost per month. Telephone lines have both a fixed cost and a per minute cost. You want to know the bandwidth and cost of each data line and the per minute rate and number of minutes for each voice line. Why? So you can comparison shop, of course.

Oh, but isn’t that a painful and horribly time consuming process? Not anymore. Not since there’s a telecom brokerage service available that offers an array of competitive voice and data line and networking services. There may be several options available for each of your needs.

Best of all, there’s a free consulting service that can help you narrow the options and compare costs directly with what you have now on a line for line basis. That information you gathered to get a handle on your current telecom expenses is all you need to get started. Call the toll free number or submit an online inquiry to get the process started. You may be shocked by how much you are spending now that can be cost reduced in short order.

How Many POTS Lines in a Trunk?

If your business started very small, your first business phone may have been your only one. It was no doubt a single line desk set or perhaps one with a wireless handset and a speakerphone. You plugged it into an RJ11 wall outlet, lifted the receiver and there was dial tone. You probably didn't refer to it as POTS, but that's what it was.

POTS is a telecom industry acronym for Plain Old Telephone Service. POTS runs on the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. POTS connections are twisted pair copper wires that run all the way from your phone jack back to the telephone company's central office. These are also called analog lines because they operate on analog voltages and currents according to standards that go all the way back to Alexander Graham Bell himself. Nowadays they may be called landlines to distinguish them from wireless phones that operate on the cellular phone networks.

POTS is solid, reliable telephone service. Voice quality is excellent. It has been enhanced over the years to include options such as call waiting, call forwarding, three way calling, and Caller ID. You can buy a nice business phone for POTS service at any office supply store. If one line isn't enough, you can get a phone that handles two POTS lines.

But what if your business has grown to the point where you need more than two outside lines? Many small to medium size businesses move up from individual phones to phone systems by adding a Key Telephone System. The key is the name for the line selector push button. Every phone set has two to six line keys along with a dial pad and other buttons. It's up to you to decide whether you'll join a conversation on one of the busy lines or select an open line to make a call.

Key Systems are also POTS based. So is the entry level PBX or Private Branch Exchange phone system. The PBX manages outside lines, so you don't have to worry about finding an open one to make a call. It also allows you to directly dial from one phone to another within the business using just a few digits. These calls never use an outside line. They are handled through the PBX system directly.

PBX systems have the ability to grow either by adding on to them or buying larger replacement systems. As your business grows you may barely notice the number of POTS lines creeping up from 4 to 6 to 10 to 20. Users generally have no idea how many lines there are. Management may also not have taken much note of the incrementally growing cost of telephone line service. POTS lines have little economy of scale. It's so much per line depending on the feature set. Saving money is where the idea of the trunk line comes in.

A trunk is a phone line that carries multiple telephone conversations. Modern trunks long ago switched from analog to digital technology. The most popular trunks are T1 telephone lines. T1 is a digital telephone standard that creates 24 individual channels in a strictly timed digital bitstream. Each channel can carry one telephone call. T1 voice lines can do the work of up to 24 POTS lines. The T1 line will plug into a T1 interface card in your PBX system or can be connected to a channel bank that will give you the 24 individual line connections.

Why go to all this trouble? It's no trouble when it results in a cost savings. That's what T1 lines offer. If you are paying for more than half a dozen individual POTS lines, T1 service will likely cost less per month for the same phone service. Once you get to 10 or 12 lines it is almost certain that you can save money by switching to a T1 line.

So, that means there are 24 POTS lines in a trunk, right? Yes...and no. T1 telephone lines can carry 24 phone lines. But many businesses prefer ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface service. This is another format of T1 line that gives you up to 23 phone lines. The other channel is reserved for switching and data, so you can have Caller ID capability on your PBX system. There's also something called Integrated T1 that gives you up to 12 phone lines and broadband Internet on one trunk line.

The newest wrinkle is the SIP trunk. SIP is the VoIP signaling protocol. A SIP trunk also carries multiple phone lines and perhaps Internet service. You can trade off voice quality for bandwidth, so a SIP trunk might carry even more than 24 phone conversations simultaneously.

How many POTS lines in a trunk? How many do you need? The trunk can be sized accordingly to give you the lowest cost for the quantity and quality of phone line service you require. Just remember that the purpose of going to trunked telephone service is to save money. How much? Check out the cost savings on telephone trunk lines now.

How Bandwidth Fosters Productivity Improvement

More bandwidth may well be one of your fastest and lowest cost solutions to improve employee productivity. By optimizing your LAN and WAN bandwidth to the pace of your business activity, you can remove a big stumbling block to performance improvement and even increase profits.

Something as mundane as telephone and computer networking seems at least one step removed from how well people perform on the job. But is it? Thinking about how fast and efficiently things get done, it seems logical that anything that creates wait time is going to hurt productivity.

A perfect example is someone researching information on the Web. If system response is sluggish, the researcher has to wait for pages to display and files to download. What's more insidious is that there may be no workaround to Internet access that varies in response time. If you know that it will take five minutes for a large file to download, then you might launch the process and work on something else in the meantime. But if your bandwidth varies so much that one time the information is available in 15 seconds and the next time it is 2 minutes, the tendency is to wait for the result. After all, you might not have time to get anything else going.

Another example is the response time for credit and debit card verification in grocery stores and retailers. There's not much you can do while waiting for approval. The clerk and the customer just stand there. If the system responds in a few seconds, fine. But what if it is a minute or more? Multiply that by the number of customers in line times the number of stations and you can see how much time is wasted on waiting. To keep customers from getting totally frustrated, perhaps deciding to shop elsewhere, you may have to open additional cash register stations with additional clerks. That's money down the drain if you could avoid the problem by switching from dial-up or slow DSL to T1 or higher line bandwidth.

It's not just the monthly cost of the bandwidth contract. You need to figure out what it costs directly in additional head count and indirectly in customer satisfaction to know if higher bandwidth is an expense or a cost reduction.

Telephone networks are subject to the same productivity restrictions. An extreme example is when a sales person needs to make a customer call and can't get an outside line. Minutes spent waiting instead of selling is truly money down the drain. A more subtle example is the call setup time in call centers. The difference between T1 PRI trunk lines with their superior signaling performance and standard T1 or analog trunks may amount to less than a second per call, but multiply that by the number of operators and the number of calls each and the erosion of productivity adds up over the course of a month.

Think of bandwidth as a limiting factor in employee performance. If network response is ten or a hundred times as fast as the servers can respond it doesn't help to add more. If you have more outside phone lines than employees, how will twice as many help? But if you have less of a resource than needed, people wait. You pay for that wait time. Eliminate the wait and you'll likely find that productivity will increase automatically.

Is restricted bandwidth costing your company money? Discover how little it costs now to speed things up for higher profits. Check current bandwidth prices for voice and data service now.