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.

How T1 Lines Support VoIP Telephony

T1 lines have long been the preferred trunking option for traditional PBX business telephone systems. But how do T1 lines support enterprise level VoIP phone systems?

Many medium and large companies are augmenting their legacy PBX phone systems with VoIP, wiring new installations as converged voice and data or even going so far as "fork lift upgrades" when the older system just isn't economical to upgrade anymore. The well-documented reasons for this trend are enhanced features that improve employee productivity, cost savings by converging both computer and voice networks into a single LAN, and ease of moves and upgrades. But one thing hasn't changed. That is the need to connect to the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network.

The PSTN, the common denominator in universal telephone service, is still a largely analog and TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) based system. Smaller organizations with need for only a few outgoing lines will likely find that standard analog business lines make the most sense for their limited key telephone systems and small PBX or IP PBX systems.

An opportunity develops when the business grows to the point where it needs 6 to 12 outgoing lines and a broadband Internet connection. At that point, T1 Integrated service starts to be more cost effective than multiple analog lines and a separate broadband service. A device called an IAD or Integrated Access Device connects to both the phone system and the network router to provide voice and data service. The Integrated T1 line feeds the IAD and may even dynamically assign bandwidth so that broadband speed is maximized when there are few or no phone calls in progress.

Enterprise VoIP systems use IP phones or ATA analog telephone adapters to connect the phones to the corporate LAN. All internal calls are handled by the system and incur no telephone company charges. Point to point T1 lines extend the LAN to connect other business sites into a single large network. VoIP calls transverse this WAN (Wide Area Network) connection, as do site to site data transfers.

T1 trunk lines are needed for the inevitable calls outside the organization. A corporation and its suppliers and major customers may be connected on an Intranet to transport voice and data. For connection to the outside world, calls have to be terminated to the PSTN. A voice gateway performs the conversion between the packet and switched networks. A single T1 trunk offers up to 24 individual telephone lines. The T1 PRI variant offers 23 lines plus a signaling and data channel that can speed call connections and offer services such as Caller ID. The T1 or T1 PRI line connects to the phone service provider to offer incoming, outgoing, local, long distance, or any combination of these phone services.

Do you use T1 lines to transport your PBX or IP PBX outside calls? If so, our expert consultants would like to save you money on your T1, Integrated T1, Point to Point T1 or T1 PRI service as soon as possible. Get an instant online quote or talk to an T1 line expert right now at T1 Rex.