Small Businesses and Voice over IP Telephony

For Small to Medium Enterprises (SME‘s). VoIP offers many ways to enhance and extend your businesses internal and external communications as well as offering valuable business benefits.

With the limited expertise available in the marketplace and previous restrictions and quality, VoIP is still a “Taboo” subject for SME‘s, but this doesn’t need to be the case. The early VoIP standards and services had limitations such as poor audio quality and the limitation of only allowing PC-to-PC calling. These issues are now a thing of the past.

So, what is Voice over IP?

Basically, its your digital telephone call transmitted as data across the Internet. As calls can be made over a fixed cost broadband service, VoIP can dramatically lower your telecommunications costs while increasing your productivity and functionality.

Voice over IP in the internal company PBX (telephone system) environment is growing in popularity with all major manufacturers work running internal VoIP for communication between handsets and the PBX. This has been enhancing internal communications with some great new features.

• Hot Desking - In call centres or hot desk orientated businesses, users can simply “Log In” to a phone to allow their extension to be as mobile as they are, which allows users to freely move from desk to desk.
• Intra-Office Communications – For the SME with multiple sites, VoIP allows free calls between the offices are data passes over the Internet or preferably via a secure point-to-point connection or an encrypted VPN.
• Remote Users – There’s no limit to distance as long as you have a broadband connection available you can receive business calls on your laptop enabling users to work from home or roaming users to be accessible on the move.
• Voicemail to Email – Having your voicemail in your inbox allows you to check your mail in a number of ways without having to either call the office, or be in the office. If for example your smart-phone retrieves your emails, you can listen to your work voicemail on your mobile.

So what else can it offer the business?

Traditionally, VoIP only worked VoIP to VoIP, which was a major limitation. Now, VoIP Providers connect VoIP, the the standard Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) allowing communication to standard land line telephone services. Making calls in this fashion saves money on traditional Line Rental call costs as well as other features listed here.

• Lower Call Charges – “Least Cost Routing” and international calls over IP resulting in much lower call costs. VoIP Providers offer less than 1p per minute 24/7 in the UK with bundled services including UK, International and Mobile calls.
• Localised Numbers – VoIP allows you to offer local numbers. i.e. Your office is based in Leeds, but you want a presence in London? Get a London Telephone number routed to you over VoIP
• Disaster Recovery - In the event that your office location is unavailable for any reason, simply reroute your calls to another location, instantly. This can also be configured as a backup.

I must recommend from experience that VoIP be deployed over redundant broadband services, or a service with a Service Level Agreement (SLA), just to ensure the service availability. Backup DSL products are relitavely cheap and should always be a business consideration in the current Internet demanding business environment.

So how can VoIP be deployed?

Well, companies with existing traditional PBX phone systems have the choice of an upgrade to allow access to all the features or alternatively, a partial VoIP system can be installed alongside the existing system to mix the new features, with the existing systems, reducing the required investment.

Small Start-Ups can use “Hosted” system, which then requires the purchase of some VoIP handsets and the monthly service costs. This hosted solution allows the extensions to “Log In” from any Internet location allowing you to work from different locations, but still get all the benefits of VoIP and a phone system.

Finally, there’s a full deployment. Using leading brands such as Cisco, Avaya or Samsung etc. you can deploy a new internal system that provides you with all the features available.

So no matter the size of your business, VoIP is a surprisingly flexible, affordable technology that offers enterprise class services at a fraction of the cost.