VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, is an emerging technology that is literally reinventing the wheel and completely changing the way we take and place phone calls. This technology refers to an amazing method of IP telephony, that is, the method of using the Internet to place phone calls that are transmitted into digital data.
Namely, when you switch to a VoIP telephone system, you can place free phone calls, and all you need is a good Internet connection. You can say goodbye to costly traditional phone lines and say hello to a free phone call system, which can not only help you save a lot of money, but also help you become significantly more efficient and productive.
However, despite VoIP’s raise in popularity, a number of small businesses are still sceptical about it and choose to remain on the bench while the big guns keep playing the game. They are mostly concerned with the costs of implementing new technologies and they think that the quality of VoIP audio is not as high as it is when it comes to traditional telephone systems. Most importantly, they fear that their phone services will suffer greatly should they experience a power outage.
The truth of the matter is that switching to VoIP is extremely beneficial and all of the benefits it can provide you with significantly outweigh the potential disadvantages. Therefore, take a closer look at the importance of VoIP and the outstanding impact it can have on your business.
Why Is VoIP Really Important?
By switching to a VoIP telephone system, you will provide your business with several very useful benefits. It doesn’t matter what size your company is, since VoIP is designed for everyone, as its primary goal is making phone calls more efficient and effective, while making them free at the same time. Here are the most essential reasons why you should definitely make the switch as soon as possible.
Reducing Your Telecommunication Costs
Instead of using the services of traditional phone companies, a VoIP system turns your phone calls into data sent over the Internet. Therefore, by switching to VoIP, your telecommunication costs will be considerably lower, since you will no longer have to pay for traditional phone lines.
This is especially important for long-distance calls, which, as you must already know, can be quite expensive. What’s more, with VoIP, there will be no reason to maintain two different networks, one for data and the other one for phone lines, so you will save even more money down the line.
Taking Calls On-the-Go
With VoIP, you can take your calls while you are on-the-go, as long as you have a reliable Internet connection. No matter where you are, you can take full advantage of your VoIP telephone system and never miss an important phone call.
This is because VoIP provides you with an amazing call forwarding feature, so you can forward all calls to you mobile phone or even your laptop, since a VoIP system comes with computer software. Therefore, all your customers and clients will always be able to easily reach you by simply dialling your regular business phone number.
Forwarding Faxes and Voicemail to Your Email Inbox
Yet another great reason for making the switch to VoIP is that the system enables you to forward all the faxes and voicemail you receive directly to your email inbox. Having all of your emails in one singular place will greatly help you become more efficient and productive, not to mention that you can easily forward any email or fax to other members of your team.
Virtual Phone Numbers
This is very important for your long-distance customers and clients, as VoIP enables you to have a business phone number with any area code that you want, instead of having only one assigned area code for the location where you operate. Getting those virtual phone numbers means that people who are not in your region can easily contact you without any charges whatsoever.
You certainly realise how important that is for your business growth. Moreover, if you happen to move your business to another location, that would require assigning a new area code to your business phone number, you won’t have to go through all the trouble of transferring your phone services to the new location, changing the number and notifying all of your customers and clients about it.
How Can You Know When Your Business Is Ready for the Switch?
If you are not sure whether or not VoIP is the right choice for your business, the aforementioned benefits it can provide you with will certainly help you make an informed decision. However, there are certain tell-tale signs that can help you know if your business is ready for VoIP, so you need to pay close attention.
If you are getting so many phone calls that you keep a number of your customers on a busy signal, you can lose a lot of them. They won’t have the patience to wait for someone to pick up the phone. VoIP is very useful in such cases, because it includes auto attendants, as well as call recording, which can help you keep your customers satisfied, and happy customers are loyal customers.
If you feel like you are spending too much money on your traditional phone system (just think about all those long-distance calls and mobile phone bills), then VoIP is definitely the way to go. Not only will you cut down on all those costs, but you will also significantly improve your customer service, since anyone who wants to contact you will be able to do so completely free of charge.
Conclusion
Trying out new stuff can be scary, especially when it’s about your business. You don’t want to expose your business to risks, but you also cannot afford to sit idly on the sidelines. No battle is ever won without risk. You need to embrace new changes and, more importantly, embrace the future.
Switching to VoIP may seem like a major decision, but it is definitely a huge step towards improving your business and leading it to greater success. Therefore, don’t hesitate any longer, but step up your game and enter the grand playing field by switching to this amazingly flexible and cost-effective technology. Make sure you know what to look for when upgrading your phone system and find a VoIP provider that can offer you the best services for your needs.
At Summit, we’re making it easy to bring your existing Aastra handset to FlexPBX so that moving from another provider is a streamlined process.
Simply select from our FlexPBX Pay as you Go (PAYG) plan or FlexPBX Max plan and we’ll hook your current Aastra handset up at no extra charge.
Aastra Mitel
Aastra 6755I
Aastra 6757ICT
Whether your current handset is a Yealink IP Phone, Polycom IP Phone, Grandstream IP Phone, Cisco IP Phone, Snom IP Phone or Aastra IP Phone, we can streamline the move from your current provider to FlexPBX with our automatic provisioning templates.
Our team are experts in telephone system migrations. Our project management team will move you from your existing system in record time all with keeping you on the air.
If you have an IP Handset not listed and would like us to certify it for use on FlexPBX, simply complete the form below and our team will contact you to arrange certification.
SIP Trunking is a relatively new technology that has a host of benefits for organisations. To gain a solid understanding of what it is, how it can benefit an organisation and what it’s benefits and drawbacks are, it’s important to understand how traditional phone systems work. This will aid in drawing comparisons between the two systems while giving context to the differences between them.
A traditional phone system is quite simple. The paradigm has not changed much in the past hundred years. In theory, it’s possible to take an old landline phone from the 1960s, plug it into a phone line and make a call.
A telephone handset is used to convert voice into analogue signals that are passed over a copper wire, to a gateway or exchange, through the public telephone network to the outside world.
Traditional telephone systems depend on the traditional infrastructure, service providers and gateway equipment. In a large company, installing, operating and managing telephone infrastructure can be expensive and time consuming.
Using SIP trunking can reduce costs considerably by simply removing most of the components needed in a traditional telephone system. It’s much easier to install and upgrade, and provides more functionality than a traditional system. It also costs far less to make calls
What is SIP Trunking?
SIP trunking is a protocol or communication standard that sends information over the internet, rather than over a fixed line telephone network.
When comparing it to a traditional telephone line, it converts voice into a digital signal which is sent directly from the handset, over the internet to the outside world. It bypasses gateways and exchanges as well as the public telephone infrastructure.
How does SIP trunking benefit a business?
Cost reduction. In a traditional telephone system, ISDN and PSTN lines carry high monthly rental charges and high call costs. The cost of making a call to another country is usually very high. Using a SIP system, monthly rental charges are reduced and included value plans are more common. This gives business a known monthly cost for all of their rental and call costs.
Scaleability. With traditional ISDN and PSTN, scaling up was timely and expensive. Not only did you have to wait for more lines to be installed, but typically you had to purchase additional equipment for your PBX. With SIP, scaling up is as simple as making a phone call to your provider. Within minutes, you can have additional SIP lines added to your account.
Reliability and ease of use. In modern cities, it is usually fairly easy to get a good quality, high bandwidth internet connection. Most companies also have redundant connectivity methods. This means that a SIP system has a high quality, redundant connection. In a traditional system, if the phone lines are damaged outside a building, all telephone communication is cut off.
What are the drawbacks of a SIP system?
A SIP system depends entirely on the internet connection it uses. If a company uses a low bandwidth connection, voice quality and reliability can be negatively affected. In some instances, you may also need to purchase additional hardware to interface legacy PBX’s.
With the roll out of the Australian National Broadband Network, reliable connectivity will make SIP trunking a very real possibility for most companies.
The only way for a business to stay in the market over a longer period of time is to constantly work on its growth. Only a couple of decades ago, this required a lot of financial investment, as growing internationally presented different types of costs for a business. The main problem that showed up was connectivity.
Luckily, as technology has evolved, being able to communicate was the first challenge that was tackled, and connectivity has allowed businesses to work together as a seamless unit, despite the fact that people working together can be thousands of miles away from each other.
Even though this has allowed businesses to grow more easily without facing huge expenses, not all of the service providers are equally secure and stable. Additionally, as an increasing number of businesses are relying on technology, the quality of service has become very important, as any problems with the preset network can result in a huge financial loss.
Let’s take a look at how important of a role uptime plays, and why investing in a better service provider will bring better results.
Communication
The reliability of communication is of great importance for every business. Imagine a business comprised of several teams throughout different geographical locations. As the teams are working on a project together, having a communication channel open at all times is necessary for progress. Without it, any problem they come across would take a lot of time to solve, as correspondence channels such as email are not exactly the fastest and most efficient ways to communicate.
This is why many businesses use VoIP service providers with secure networks that are always online and specially made for business purposes. As communication is important now more than ever, using a provider that ensures maximal uptime is necessary for maximal productivity. A provider with an unstable network can lead to slower productivity.
Beside the in-house business communication, many businesses employ this technology in marketing and customer support purposes. This is another business process in which a stable VoIP network is necessary for offering the best service possible.
Company workflow
Even though there are plenty of public software tools useful for business globally, setting up one in-house is a choice many go with due to security reasons. Private networks provide businesses with complete privacy and security that ensures all of the crucial data remains in the business’s ownership.
However, picking the right provider for setting up intranet is a task not to be taken lightly. Uptime also plays an important role in setting up a system like this, as it can greatly impede a company’s performance. Here are a few examples that showcase the importance of intranet uptime:
Collaboration – Teams working together require continuous intranet uptime, as plenty of processes are worked on in unison. There are plenty of scenarios in which this type of approach significantly speeds up time needed for project accomplishment.Collaboration is a necessity in the business world of today, and working on an unstable system can negatively impact the overall productivity.
Document sharing – Businesses have an abundance of documentation that should be accessible to all the employees at all times. Whereas documentation is not always needed, there are times when it is crucial for speeding up a project. This is why a cloud system should be on a intranet that is stable and always up and running.On the other hand, there is always new information that should be added to the centralised knowledge base, or documentation that employees want to send to each other. All this makes it necessary for the system to always be working, as any downtime will impede workflow, increasing the time needed for project accomplishment.
A stable knowledge base – Knowledge base tools are ways of keeping the business efficient, effective and more productive. Hosting such a software tool on an intranet requires speed, reliability and security. Also, this type of tool can be used for different purposes such as project management, which heavily relies on a system’s stability.With a stable system, a knowledge base can grow to become a very important part of a company that should always be accessible to higher management and employees. This is where bad uptime can make the system less effective.
These are only some of the examples of how important the uptime of an intranet is. A company should work on a system that is always online. The importance can be compared to that of a bridge. As long it is standing everything is fine, but in case it collapses, you will immediately experience a loss.
To make sure that your intranet’s uptime is impressive, make sure to work with businesses that have plenty of experience with this type of service.
Financial loss
Why does it all matter? Well, all of the problems that might occur with unstable technology comes down to financial loss. Imagine heavily relying on a VoIP or data system that goes offline every week for one hour, when it matters the most. It makes it impossible for wide range of employees to finish their tasks and move on to others. While this might not be tragical for a small business, the higher it scales, the more damage is being done.
Look at this from another perspective, you are paying an employee, no matter if the communication or data system is working or not. If the system is down, productivity drops, as employees cannot finish their tasks and you, as the business owner, are wasting money every single minute the system is down.
When you have two employees, this might not be a serious issue, but what if you have 200 employees? A single minute of downtime turns into hours of wasted money. To avoid these losses from happening, it is a better solution to work with service providers that guarantee high network uptime.
If you are thinking about creating a business datacenter infrastructure, VoIP system or intranet, one of the first things you should think about is the uptime. Do your research well and always work with a service provider that successfully delivers a high system uptime.
At Summit, we’re making it easy to bring your current handset to FlexPBX by certifying a number of brands so that moving from another provider is a streamlined process.
Simply select from our FlexPBX Pay as you Go (PAYG) plan or FlexPBX Max plan and we’ll hook your current handset up at no extra charge.
Whether your current handset is a Yealink IP Phone, Polycom IP Phone, Grandstream IP Phone, Cisco IP Phone, Snom IP Phone or Aastra IP Phone, we can streamline the move from your current provider with our automatic provisioning templates.
Our team are experts in telephone system migrations. Our project management team will move you from your existing system in record time all with keeping you on the air.
Is your phone system NBN ready? Many businesses are being caught out with the NBN rollout finding out after the fact that their current analogue phone system, key telephone system or traditional pabx is not NBN compatible.
With the arrival of the NBN, your business will need to move from traditional PSTN and ISDN telephone services to IP or SIP telephone services.
Summit has designed a number of ways to make the migration to an NBN Compatible Telephone System as painless as possible. We have an expert team who will work with you to Project Manage your move to an NBN Ready Phone System.
Hosted Telephone System
The easiest way to get a NBN Compatible Telephone Service is using a Hosted Phone System, Hosted PBX or Cloud PBX. With a Hosted PBX, the only equipment required in your business is an Internet Connection and the Phone Handsets on the desk. The Phone System lives in the cloud inside Summit’s Secure Datacentes. FlexPBX from Summit Internet offers you phone bill certainty with Unlimited Standard Local, National and Mobile calls for just $39.95 per user, per month.
PSTN or ISDN Gateway
If you want to keep your existing phone system, such as NEC Xen, NEC Topaz, NEC SV8100, LG Aria, Nortel BCM, Commander Phone System, Siemens PABX, Avaya IP Office, LG IPECS, Samsung PABX, Mitel, Alcatel PABX, Hybrex Phone System or Panasonic PBX, then you will need a PSTN or ISDN Gateway.
A PSTN or ISDN gateway allows you to connect your traditional phone system to the Summit IP Voice Network to be NBN ready.
Summit Internet offers a range of PSTN and ISDN gateways for Voice over IP Telephony on the NBN and work closely with a number of Traditional Phone System Technicals to install and configure your phone system to be ready for the NBN.
Don’t get caught out and be cut off. Speak to us now to move on to a NBN ready phone solution.
