SIP over MPLS for Enterprise VoIP

SIP Trunking is widely popular for smaller businesses who can save on their monthly telecom bill by getting both their telephone and Internet broadband services on a single integrated line. SIP Trunking is also a cost saver for large corporate headquarters or call centers that need many outside phone lines and already have converged voice and data LANs. But what about the organization with multiple locations?

The answer may well be SIP over MPLS. You may already have an MPLS network in place for sharing data files between branch offices and headquarters. Cost tradeoffs almost always give the advantage to an MPLS network over a suite of point to point data lines of equivalent bandwidth. With MPLS, you only need a last mile connection to each of your locations. As the name implies, these are point to point pipes measuring just thousands of feet to the nearest central office. The major distance spans are handled by the fiber optic core of the MPLS network.

There are also security advantages with MPLS versus IP networking, such as the Internet. MPLS uses proprietary labels to direct traffic, not the IP header information that is often the target of malicious activity. The network is privately operated and not accessible by the general public. You need to be a contracted customer with defined locations and connections between them that are managed by the network operator.

What you may not realize is that MPLS networks can handle voice traffic as well as data. The name MPLS actually stands for Multi-Protocol Label Switching. The network can handle nearly any protocol and is perfect for packet switched services of all types. For larger organizations, MPLS provides the WAN connections you need to link a few or many converged voice and data networks.

Do you currently have data connections between your sites but stand-alone analog or PRI telephone lines at each? That works, but you are probably paying toll charges to call between offices. There’s no economy of scale if each facility is relatively small and in a different city or state than the others. By consolidating your telephony, data lines and perhaps broadband connectivity with a single provider you can likely realize a considerable cost savings while maintaining call quality and network speed.

The MPLS labels or tags do their magic by not only specifying packet destinations, but also class of service. This keeps data file transfers from damaging the much more fragile real-time demands of voice and video. If you have company wide VoIP now and conversations get distorted or calls drop when the network gets congested, traffic engineering is what you need. MPLS networks are engineered with committed rates for your services, as well as those of other network customers. That ensures that you have the bandwidth you purchase regardless of what anyone else is doing. Contrast that commitment with the best-effort information services, such as the Internet, where performance is all over the map.

With SIP over MPLS, your telephone calls within the company stay on-net and off the public switched telephone network. You don’t pay toll charges for office calls that stay on your network regardless of whether they are from desks twenty feet apart or branch offices thousands of miles apart. It’s even possible to include international locations on the same MPLS network to truly integrate your company communications. When calls go off-net to outside landlines or mobile phones, those terminations are handled by your SIP Trunking service provider. Since the network is converged, there is no need for a separate telephone network and your support needs may also be reduced.

Does your organization have multiple locations that could be more efficiently run by a voice and data MPLS network? Get pricing for MPLS Network Services quickly and easily to compare with your current bills.

Get a Toll Free Number Instantly

You’re starting a new business or breathing new life into an existing one. You’ve come to the conclusion that a toll free number will help you get more sales prospects and orders. It will also improve your reputation for fast and easy customer service. Now that you’ve made the decision you’d love to get started right away. But you have to wait at least a week to establish a toll free number, right?

Wrong! You can have your toll free number up and running in less time that it takes you to read this article. If you don’t want to wait even that long, order and activate your toll free number now. Yes, you can have an 800, 855, 866, 877 or 888 toll free number for your business or personal use as close to instantly as possible.

How does this work. It’s all thanks to the highly efficient online provisioning process from Kall8. They have gone to the trouble of setting up a large collection of toll free numbers, so all you have to do is select one you like the look or sound of and place your order. You pay for these with a credit card that is also billed monthly for your service, so there is no long approval process involved.

How much will a toll free number set you back? Hold on to your chair so you fall off. The cost is just $2 each for 888, 877, 866 or 855 prefixes. That’s what you pay to get your number assigned and set up for use. Then the cost is just $2 a month to maintain service plus the cost of incoming calls on a per minute basis.

Note that the older 800 toll free numbers are slightly more expensive. Those are $5 each and $5 per month plus the cost of calls.

There are even more expensive vanity numbers that spell out specific words on the telephone keyboard to make them easier to remember. Examples of numbers now on the vanity list are 1-877-9-Alimony (1-888-925-4666) and 1-877-5-BIGMONEY (1-877-524-4666). The prices on these vary from $15 to over $100 for setup and monthly fee. What’s an example of an expensive one? How about 1-877-5-MESOTHELIOMA (1-877-563-7684).

What do you get with your Kall8 toll free service? First, you get your number ready to use as soon as you complete the order process that takes only a few minutes. You specify which phone you want incoming calls to go to. These numbers don’t have their own phone line. Instead, you program them to ring to your office phone, home phone, cell phone or other phone that you’ll be near. You can change this ring-to number any time as your location changes so that you’ll never miss a call.

Do you get voice mail? Yes, it’s included. You can call in to get messages from the system or have them sent to you as attachments to your email. That way you can hear your messages on your computer without having to pick up a phone. You’ll also be able to get FAX messages sent to your email as attachments. No need for a separate fax machine to get messages. Just tell clients to send them to your toll free number.

Other features include call blocking, maximum call length setting, Caller ID, and even conference calling with up to 25 participants. These features are included as part of your monthly service fee, starting at just $2 per month.

How much will you pay for calls? The cost to the caller is free, of course. You pay 6.9 center per minute for calls from the 48 US states and Canada. There is a surcharge for calls that come in from Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guam and Saipan. Payphone callers will cost you an extra 60 cents per call, per FCC tariff.

With toll free numbers as cheap as $2 each and $2 a month, plus 6.9 cents a minute for most incoming calls, it’s hard to go wrong getting a toll free number for your business. There are no contacts involved, so if you don’t want the service anymore, you can simply cancel and only pay for the usage to date.

Are you ready to pick out a number and get it working for you? If so, then choose your toll free number and order it now. It will be ready for use right away.

How To Reduce Your Business Wireless Costs

Are you suspicious that you may be spending a lot more on business mobile wireless services than you should be? It’s for a good reason. You most likely are. How much? Somewhere between 25 and 35%. Now, how would you like to capture that savings for your company?

I thought you would, so here’s the secret to doing just that. What you need to do is gather up all your wireless bills, go through them with a fine tooth comb to identify which plans are being used optimally and which have services going to waste, look for billing errors, find devices without any use and eliminate them, identify voice and data overages and figure out how to adjust those plans, consolidate vendors, and make sure you identify all unpublished plans and discount programs that are available for your business.

What? Do all that and still get your job done? Why, you’d need to hire a wireless expert for all that analysis and change activity. Oh, you could assign each employee the job of managing their smartphone and other wireless devices, but that’s pretty much hit and miss. They won’t spend much time on it and probably don’t know what to do next. Plus, how can you get economy of scale with everybody going in a different direction?

Obviously, you can’t make much progress without the sufficient expertise, time, and knowledge of all the products and services and their pricing that you could be taking advantage of. Fortunately, you don’t need to be an expert or hire an expert employee. You just need to bring in some expert help.

The service you are looking for is Advantix. Their specialty is telecom analysis and management, both for wireline and wireless services. Analyzing wireline phone bills is something many consulting firms do. But how many are up to speed on wireless to the point where they can expect to cut your expenses by up to a third or more?

The wireless monster has sneaked up on most businesses. They think of it as having a few cell phones around for key employees. In reality, they are spending thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars a year... one phone at a time.

Avantix takes a comprehensive approach to optimizing your wireless business services. They’ll collect and analyze all your wireless expenses for billing errors, unused and underused services, overage situations, missed opportunities for business plan discounts, and opportunities to consolidate carriers for major savings. They’ll even go to bat for you to prepare the RFPs, evaluate competing proposals, and negotiate the contracts.

Do you really think that you are up enough on the wireless industry to know how to find every discount or opportunity for savings? Probably not, unless that’s your main business. Why not get a risk-free, no-obligation wireless analysis from Advantix and see what they can do without increasing your workload? The savings can be substantial, even eye-popping.

SIP Trunks vs ISDN PRI

Enterprise telephony long ago advanced beyond analog business lines in favor of PBX telephone systems and ISDN PRI trunking. Now there’s another option that may offer cost and performance advantages for companies that want to improve their voice services. It’s called SIP Trunking. Let’s compare and contrast SIP Trunks with ISDN PRI to see how to choose between them.

You should know that we are still talking exclusively about digital telephony. There is no analog transport in either a SIP Trunk or PRI. What differentiates the two is that ISDN PRI is based on a switched circuit model and SIP Trunking is based on packet switching.

For many companies it could be six of one and a half-dozen of the other. That’s because either trunking service can be made to work with your in-house phone system. The idea behind digital trunking is to carry a half-dozen or more outside phone lines on a single digital line. Usually that’s one or more T1 lines, although DS3, OC3 fiber or Ethernet can also be used.

ISDN PRI uses a T1 line configured into 23 separate voice channels plus one data and control channel. Most PBX systems and the newer IP PBX phone systems make it easy to connect to ISDN PRI. They either offer one or more PRI ports built-in or accommodate a plug-in adaptor card.

If you need more than 23 lines, you simply add more ISDN PRI lines incrementally. Each additional line can bring in up to 23 more business phone lines. You’ll have to check what’s available for your phone system, but it is not uncommon to have 2 to 4 PRI lines plugged into a PBX system.

The technology used for ISDN PRI is defined by the Integrated Systems Digital Network specification. PRI is the Primary Rate Interface. There is also a lower performance BRI or Basic Rate Interface that isn’t seen much anymore. This is a legacy telephone technology designed to support the idea of separate digitized telephone lines, one per channel. There’s no chance of interference between calls because the channels are strictly defined and timed using Time Division Multiplexing.

SIP Trunking is more of a network than a telephone based technology. It is a packet switched network line, much like you would use to connect two business locations. What SIP Trunking can do is directly support a converged voice and data network. You can run SIP Trunks between business locations to expand your voice and data network geographically.

The SIP in SIP Trunking stands for Session Initiation Protocol. That’s the switching technology used in VoIP telephone systems. In SIP trunking the control signals for the phone system are transported in packets that travel down the same network pipe as the voice packets.

ISDN PRI isn’t so much about convergence. It’s really about having separate telephone and data lines leave the premises, although you are free to converge your in-house network and let an IP PBX system on the network handle call routing, including outside calls on the ISDN PRI trunk line.

SIP Trunking doesn’t have to be about convergence, either. You can simply use a SIP Trunk to connect your PBX system to a telephone service provider rather than using an ISDN PRI. Depending on which CODEC or coding scheme you use, you may be able to handle more than 23 lines on a SIP Trunk. If you are using an Ethernet connection to your provider, you may be able to support dozens of phone lines depending on the bandwidth available.

For small businesses, SIP Trunks can be configured to transport both voice and data to your service provider. Most often this is used to bring in telephone lines and broadband Internet service on the same SIP Trunk. There’s a cost advantage, even if you are not running a converged voice and data in-house.

Since either ISDN PRI or SIP Trunking might be able to support your needs, how do you choose? That depends on the features you desire and what’s available to serve your particular business location. You may have several options to choose from. To find out, check out SIP Trunks and ISDN PRI availability and pricing now.

Pick Unlimited Toll Free Numbers

You know that having a toll free number is good for business. In fact, it’s so good for business that customer calls can start flooding in once you’ve gotten the word out that people can call you for free. Now, if you could just protect yourself against the cost of that onslaught. Wait! You can.

The service you want is unlimited toll free numbers. By unlimited, I mean you pay one small price per month for the complete sophisticated toll free service. No ugly surprises on your credit card. Within the limits of fair use, your toll free service is one flat rate and that’s that.

Well, you actually get a lot more than simply the peace of mind that comes from knowing what your toll free bill will be each month. This unlimited toll free service has over 30 features that you might think would cost extra. Not with iTeleCenter unlimited toll free numbers. Their toll free service offers an auto attendant or main greeting feature so you don’t need to hire a receptionist to screen your calls. You not only get voicemail, but voicemail messages sent to email or text to your cell phone. You also get online faxing and follow me call forwarding. Plus there are 30 other calling features, too.

Don’t these features sound like something you’d expect to pay big bucks for with a sophisticated business phone system? Yes they do. What’s more, with most phone services you have to pay extra for a toll free number and then pay extra per minute for every call you receive. Outrageous! That’s yesterday’s telecom service. Today’s service is one flat monthly rate that includes all phone services plus the toll free number of your choice.

Yes, you get to select your toll free number from an inventory of 800, 866, 877 and 888 numbers that are all set up and ready to use. Other companies expect you to wait for days or weeks while they do their job of preparing a toll free number of their choice for your use. Forget that. You pick the number using the handy number search box (like the screen shot shown on this page) and then proceed to grab it for your exclusive use. How long does that take? Just a few minutes. The entire process is automated online and available 24/7. If you want toll free service at 3 in the morning, go right ahead and get it. They’re always open for business.

What you get with this unlimited toll free number service is pretty amazing. What you don’t have to deal with is equally impressive. You don’t get stuck paying per minute charges for your incoming toll free calls. They’re all included in the low monthly rate. You don’t pay any activation fees. Those can be substantial with other services and you may not even find out about them until you are ready to check out. There are no extra fees for any of the calling features - they are all included. There are no surcharges or hidden fees, either.

Sounds pretty good, but you’re still not sure? What would you say if I told you that there are no contracts involved. What if it were so completely risk free that you can try it for free? That’s right. You can start your 14 day free trial right now. Give it a good shakedown and then decide if this unlimited toll free number service is right for your business. Chances are that you’ll like it so much that you’ll never shop around again.

I’ve saved the best for last. This impressive service is just $49 per month for unlimited calls. Yes, that low rate plus NO contracts to sign and a 14 day FREE trial just to make sure you’re happy. Would you like to get started right now? Go ahead, choose your number, get complete terms and start your unlimited toll free service free trial now.