Voice over IP Offers Your Business an Inexpensive Alternative To
Toll Free Numbers
New businesses can now let their customers contact them for free
or inexpensively with the use of Voice over IP telephony,
without having to lease the ever more expensive toll free
numbers offered by many telecoms companies around the world.
With Voice over IP telephony, local numbers can be setup in
scores of towns and cities across a country at relatively low
costs. These can then connect to a central Voice over IP service
provider, which will allow free or low rate calls to you from
your customers.
Internet telephony or Voice over IP as it is more commonly known
has been hailed as the next big thing in the telecommunications
world for quite some time. In the past it has been plagued with
poor sound and connection quality, as well as complex and
frustrating installations.
With huge advances in Voice over IP technology in the last few
years, you no longer have to sit at your computer in order to
make a phone call over the Internet using Voice over IP. It is
now possible to use an ordinary phone, connected to a Voice over
IP adaptor (gateway). Some specialised Voice over IP phones (IP
phones) have this technology built into their circuitry,
effectively allowing you to plug and play.
Voice over IP splits your voice into Internet Protocol Data
Packets. These packets are then routed over the Internet. This
makes it a lot cheaper for Voice over IP service providers to
carry your calls. Using this method Voice over IP service
providers only have to pay a small termination fee at the point
where they drop your call off. This in turn make Voice over IP
extremely cost effective for those companies who cannot afford
the high costs associated with those of toll free numbers. It
would then become possible for example to rent phone numbers in
major cities across a country at cheap rates, and people in
these cities would then be able to talk to you for just the cost
of a local call.
In the past few years Voice over IP has matured and is fast
becoming the way to make cheap rate calls both nationally and
internationally. In fact most major telecoms companies around
the world, are now gearing up to charge us for the amount of
data sent or received, as opposed to the length of call time.
Many businesses are taking early advantage of the huge cost
savings for them and their customers, through the implementation
of Voice over IP telephony.