....The Straight Scoop On Business VoIP....
VoIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol, is an enigma for many.
There are many flavors of VoIP and many pros and cons that you
need to be aware of when considering which service to choose.
One goal of this article is to help you decipher through the
technospeak so that you can make an informed decision that will
save you time and money.
The first thing you need to know about VoIP Service is that it
can replace your local phone company. Whether you have just one
POTS (plain old telephone service) line or a voice T1 (24
bundled dedicated lines), a VoIP solution is meant to replace
your phone company. Instead of using your local phone company's
voice connection, VoIP will digitize your voice signal and send
it over an internet connection.
In order for your voice to transmit digitally through the
internet, you need to be sure you have enough bandwidth to
facilitate the communication link. A minimum of a DSL line is
required, but most larger companies will want a T1 line - a
dedicated link directly to the internet that is guaranteed to be
up over 99.999% of the time. Since you will be entrusting all of
your business voice communication to this new technology, your
connection to the internet becomes the critical link and you
don't want to risk a company-wide phone outage to save a few
hundred dollars on your bandwidth connection. To help with this
DS3-Bandwidth.com has
developed software that will allow you to generate a T1
or DS3 price in just seconds.
Once you have your high-speed internet connection taken care
of, it's time to select a VoIP Service Provider - the company
that will actually route your digitized voice signal to a real
telephone on the other end. In essence, your VoIP Carrier will
become your long distance carrier. The service providers Business-Vo
IP-Solution.com work with offer unlimited telephone calls
to the United States and Canada, all for one fixed price. That's
a good place to start your search. For companies who average
more than $40 in local and long distance usage per employee,
VoIP is well worth the initial investment.
There are likewise other hidden benefits of VoIP Service, the
main benefit being the reduced bandwidth required to conduct a
regular telephone conversation. Since a VoIP transmission only
requires 32KB of bandwidth, you can fix up to 24 'VoIP lines' on
a data T1, and still have 768KB left over for dedicated
high-speed internet access! This means that you can migrate your
entire phone system on to your existing T1 and still have half
of the bandwidth allocated for data.
Other benefit of VoIP lies in the prioritization of the
digitized voice signals that are generated when you speak. In
the event no one is talking, the VoIP line does not transmit any
data. This allows your T1 line to dynamically allocate bandwidth
as it is needed, instead of permanently blocking out an entire
channel of data.
Lastly, the MAJOR benefit of VoIP telephone systems is that
they come with a very rich feature set. Some common features
include: Unlimited Minutes,,Local Number Porting (LNP),
Personalized Voicemail, Unlimited In-Network Calling, Caller ID,
Caller ID Blocking, Call Waiting, Call Waiting ID, Call
Forwarding, 3-way Conferencing, Call Return *69 activates,
Online Management & Billing, Choose Your Own Area Code, *70 Call
Waiting Disable, *78/*79 Do Not Disturb, *77/*87 Anonymous Call
Blocking, Distinctive Ringing for Virtual Numbers, Virtual Phone
Numbers all over the world, Enhanced 911, and Toll Free
Services. You just can't get all that service with regular phone
service without paying extra fees and surcharges. These features
are standard with most business VoIP plans!