Because of the current economic slowdown, many businesses are revaluating their cost structures. Not surprisingly, businesses of all sizes will discover that IT expenses deeply erode their profitability. Between internet bandwidth and a phone company PBX, phone and internet can cost more than $150 per month per employee, or over $10k year for an office of just ten. During times like these, a VOIP business phone system can leverage affordable broadband access by incorporating calling on a PBX system for a fraction of what the phone company or other telecom administrators might charge with all of the convenience and reliability that comes from having a PBX hosted externally.
Quite simply, VOIP is able to exploit the unused internet bandwidth that most businesses have in order to transmit voice packets over the line. So long as the connection has CIR and QoS features to ensure that voice can move consistently and uninhibited by other network traffic, VOIP requires no additional internet or phone infrastructure. VOIP phones simply plug into existing Ethernet. Voice gets converted into digital voice ‘packets,’ which are routed to their destination almost entirely via internet infrastructure before reconnecting with PSTN infrastructure for the final length. Since internet bandwidth is vastly cheaper for the solution provider than the PSTN, they can pass those savings onto businesses in the form of practically free calling. At the end of the day, businesses adopting a VOIP business phone system will not only benefit from free intra-office calling via the PBX hosted by the provider, but also eliminate incoming call charges and reduce long distance calling charges to pennies per minute.
While in the past, some reluctant to adopt VOIP because of voice quality, phones today are arguably clearer than their traditional counterparts. What’s more, many of the poor VOIP quality some individuals report is explained by the type of DSL they subscribe to, which is not optimized for VOIP. DSL in that form, however, has lost tremendous share to cable and T-lines as a way to access the internet, making the solution deployable and scalable for almost any business.
Some businesses already pay tremendous sums for internet and don’t use all the available bandwidth. A VOIP solution will allow subscribers to make the most of their bandwidth and save on phone service – more than welcome during these hard economic times.
