E911 For Enterprise VoIP

The move from switched circuit to packet switched telephony has created some unintended consequences. One of these is emergency calling to 911. We take the 911 system for granted. When disaster strikes, just punch in those three little numbers and help will be on the way. Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Now consider this. There’s a fire in the maintenance closet down the hall and it’s getting out of control. You pick up your handset and dial 911. You reach the emergency operator and report the fire, then run out of the building and across the street. An hour later, the facility has burned to the ground and no fire trucks have shown up. How could this happen?

The fire trucks did show up within 5 minutes of your call. Unfortunately, they went to your main office in Phoenix. You just called from the satellite office in Indianapolis. Oops! Something is not set up properly on your VoIP phone system.

Such a problem would never arise on an analog landline phone. Why? Because the phone wire is in the ground at it always goes the same place. That’s why they call it a landline. VoIP, however, is a network service. As long as a SIP phone can connect to the network, it can make a call. It makes no difference where that connection takes place. Networks that encompass multiple locations need special consideration when they are converged for voice and data. The same technology that makes it easy to move phones around also makes it easy to lose track of just where they are plugged-in. This is especially true if any of your phones connect via the Internet.

XO Communications, a leader in enterprise VoIP deployments, has an instructional video called “9 Ways to Ensure E911 VoIP Service for Enterprise VoIP Deployments.” Have a look now and see if there is something needing your attention...



Make no mistake about it. VoIP technologies, including Hosted PBX and Unified Communications, offer enormous benefits in cost reduction and employee productivity improvement. Like all new technology, the more cutting edge the solution, the trickier it is to get it right. You want to be working with a top-tier service provider who understands the legal requirements for issues such as E911 and has processes in-place to ensure that your system is set up accurately.

If you are considering an upgrade to your business phone system, get recommendations, options and pricing on competing telephony solutions. Be sure you understand how they ensure accurate E911 call routing.

Best VoIP Providers For Business

Have you been thinking about making the move from multi-line analog or PRI trunk phone service to VoIP, but unsure about how well it will work? Here are some ideas and recommendations about what you can achieve and how to proceed successfully.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is also called “network voice” to distinguish it from traditional wireline phone service. The key word is “network.” VoIP is designed to run on computer networks rather than the proprietary telephone technologies we’ve been using for the last century. In fact, on the network, voice is just another service running along with data, video and streaming audio. Every service generates packets that are transported from source to destination using routers and switches on the network.

This presents a huge cost savings opportunity for larger businesses. Having one network to carry all traffic saves over having to maintain separate telephone and data networks. It’s less of an issue for smaller companies, although there are also cost savings in having one service provider connection instead of different telephone and broadband lines.

Where VoIP has gotten a dicey reputation is from using the Internet as both a telephone line and a broadband data service. The Internet wasn’t designed for high quality two-way voice conversations, so it’s a hit and miss proposition as to how good the voice quality of your conversations will be. Some calls may sound as good or better than the best analog line. Others will sound distorted and slightly delayed so that you and the other party cut off each other’s conversations. Residential users may not find this variable performance all that annoying, so they’re happy with the savings they get from dumping their analog landlines in favor of using their broadband Internet connection for both phone and computer service.

Business users who want clear conversations with their customers at all times have some better performing options available. Medium and larger companies will opt for a private line or MPLS network connection to their phone system provider. This is also called a SIP Trunk after the Session Initiation Protocol standard used for VoIP switching. A SIP trunk can support multiple simultaneous phone conversations, similar to an ISDN PRI trunk that is used with in-house PBX telephone systems.

Note that the type of VoIP service we’re talking about here is remotely hosted telephone switching at a service provider’s location. This is also known as Hosted VoIP, Hosted PBX, or communications in the cloud.

Small companies can also benefit from Hosted PBX service even if they have only a few to a few dozen telephones. In this case, the SIP Trunking provider supplies your business with an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that uses the SIP trunk to deliver both telephone and broadband Internet service. Unlike residential broadband phone service, the SIP trunk keeps the voice and data packets from interfering with each other. That maintains your voice quality on telephone calls. The phones have priority. Any bandwidth they are not using is automatically assigned as broadband Internet bandwidth. With some providers, you may also elect to plug existing analog phones into the IAD. This is called an analog handoff.

Another service that can provide both Internet and telephone service is Cable business broadband and telephone bundled service. You have one line coming into your office in the form of a coaxial cable. This cable carries telephone, broadband Internet and even television. Quality of service is maintained by keeping the telephone, television and Internet services in their own channels on the cable. Your phone service is VoIP technology, but your phone calls never touch the Internet. They just ride their own channel of the cable to a switching system that connects to the public telephone system. Note that to make this work, you need to get both your business broadband and phone service from the same Cable provider, like Comcast.

Are you interested in learning more about the advanced features and quality of service protections for VoIP service? Get features and pricing from the best VoIP providers for business telephone service now.

Vocal IP Networx Offers Free SNMP Monitoring

You’re probably used to ordering T1 lines and other bandwidth solutions. You also know that it’s up to you to know when your service is available and not available. Sometimes that’s a bit tricky because you buy the line service from one carrier, install a edge router you get from another vendor and load up the network with firewalls, servers and other devices. It’s a good thing that you are around to monitor all this 24/7. You are available 24/7 aren’t you?

Large corporations have round the clock IT staffing and their own network operations centers (NOCs). Medium and smaller size companies wing it overnight and plan on dealing with issues as they arise. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get some help in monitoring your network operations without it costing you a fortune?

Vocal IP Networx, a leader in IP telephony solutions and services, may have the answer to your need. They are offering free 24/7 SNMP monitoring of every circuit and deployed customer premises equipment (CPE) supplied by Vocal IP Networx. Their state of the art NOC keeps close watch and responds to outages and potential devices failures, even before a problem manifests itself.

Here’s something even more impressive. Vocal practices what they call “open book” management, meaning that you, as a customer, have access to their monitoring system via a secure Web portal. No need to wonder what’s going on when you can log in and see for yourself anytime.

Here’s some of what Vocal IP Networx monitors: Processor load, current memory use, priority queue levels, overheating, bandwidth utilization and spikes, plus interface errors.

SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. It is an industry standard protocol defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). When SNMP is running on a network, there are 3 components involved. The first is the managed device, of course. That could be a router, firewall, switch, server or other network element. Agent software is installed on the managed device to gather the data and process it for presentation. At the other end of the line is Network Management System (NMS) software that queries the managed devices.

You may have hear of Vocal IP Networx as a provider of high performance hosted PBX business telephone solutions. One good reason that they enjoy a high performance reputation is that Vocal goes way beyond just providing a switching system for your SIP phones. They offer the entire solution, including private lines, dedicated Internet access and nationwide MPLS service.

Having control of the WAN network plus the managed network devices is a huge advantage in ensuring quality of service. The SNMP monitoring is just part of that. Engineering the solution in the first place to ensure that traffic is properly prioritized into classes of service and that there is sufficient bandwidth and minimal latency, jitter and packet loss is what it takes to confidently go with hosted communications services for your important business needs.

Would you feel more confident knowing that your service provider is monitoring not just the equipment at their end, but the entire network back to your facilities? That’s available as a free bonus when you select Vocal IP Networx as your provider. Get competitive quotes for Vocal IP Networx and other high quality service providers for WAN bandwidth line services and hosted VoIP phone service. You may be surprised to find out that you can get higher performance and more reliable service for what you are paying now.



Note: Image of network operations center courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Cloud Hosting Providers For Converged Networks

Cloud computing services are growing geometrically. If you haven’t gotten on-board yet, it’s probably because you aren’t convinced of the cost savings, security or the ability of the cloud to cover all bases for your IT needs. That picture is changing rapidly. Let’s take a snapshot of what’s available now for SMB users.

When we think of cloud computing, the picture that comes to mind is one of a giant brain in the sky that runs operations for hundreds or thousands of companies. That’s the approach that gets all the press, but it’s far from the entirety of the market. Indeed, there are many other providers out there who can deliver the virtual services you need on a less grand scale. You may not be able to get everything from one service provider, but the building blocks are out there to handle your voice and data needs.

That’s important, because enterprise VoIP solutions are driving a trend toward converged networks. If you only consider moving traditional data center servers to the cloud, you’ll be missing a big piece of the puzzle. The other trend that’s important is fixed mobile convergence that integrates cell phones into your telecom infrastructure. Mobility can be the link that makes or breaks your productivity in the future.

The foundation of cloud computing is cloud hosting that incorporates Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Cloud infrastructure is virtualization on steroids. IT departments have found that virtualizing servers ups the efficiency of the physical server hardware. What cloud computing does is greatly expand the virtualization to include huge racks of high performance servers plus storage and bandwidth. It differs from the virtualization that you would do yourself or the virtual servers you’d rent from a colocation center in that it is sold incrementally on-demand. You pay by the minute, by the hour or by the number of CPU cycles used.

Another characteristic of cloud hosting is that it is highly elastic or scalable. If you start to run out of capacity, you simply order up more virtual servers. The cloud operating system takes care of how these resources work in concert to provide the capacity you need. At no point do you have to purchase, install or maintain any equipment. The cloud service provider takes care of this with a 24/7 technical staff.

There are actually three types of clouds to choose from. The one that first comes to mind is the public cloud that serves many users simultaneously. You gain access via a private line or dedicated Internet service. Companies that have highly sensitive applications, unique requirements or simply want more control go with a private cloud. That is a similar infrastructure to the public cloud but on a scale suitable for one company. The hybrid cloud is a combination of the two. Public facing or non-critical applications run on the public cloud, while a separate private cloud handles very sensitive applications.

While cloud computing is thought of a data processing service, there is also a voice cloud known as cloud communications or hosted PBX. In this case, the computing resources are specific to telephony needs and the connectivity is by SIP trunk from your location and to the public switched telephone network from the provider. You no longer need a PBX phone system in-house or any telephone trunk lines. What you have is SIP telephones connected to your network and a converged SIP trunk from your business location or locations to the service provider. Some hosted PBX systems integrate cell phones into the system so that you have the same capabilities while mobile as at your desk.

Some of the cloud services you can readily get include cloud hosting, hosted PBX, unified communications, enterprise cloud security, private/public clouds, cloud storage, hosted Exchange, SharePoint, disaster recovery, anti-spam and anti-virus, hosted firewalls, and dedicated cloud access connections.

Are you feeling that you may be missing out on productivity improvements, cost savings, agility of scaling your business, or advanced features available in the cloud? This would be a good time to explore options with multiple cloud hosting providers. You can start small and grow or make a step-change relocation to the cloud, depending on what works best for your company.

Cloud Computing For Disaster Recovery

It’s been quite a year for natural disasters. Fires scorching thousands of acres at a time, rivers overflowing their banks, torrential rainfall, tornadoes everywhere. Are you feeling a little nervous that your business could be taken out at any time?

Sadly, an unfortunate twist of fate can hit anyone at any time. You probably already have some protections in place, such as property insurance, tape or disk file backups and maybe even offsite storage of important files. Ask yourself this, however. How will you get your business back running immediately after a catastrophic local disaster?

While having copies of critical documents and customer files may prevent you from going out of business permanently if disaster strikes, they aren’t enough to keep you running without a hiccup. For that you need backup infrastructure as well as files. A generation ago, that meant duplicate data centers that were located far apart. The idea is that the kind of disaster that wipes out your facilities is unlikely to hit two geographically separated areas simultaneously. If you are prone to earthquakes, one data center can be local but the other must be in an earthquake free zone. The same thing applies to hurricanes. If you are on the coast, your backup must be far inland.

Today’s disaster recovery solution of choice is the cloud. With infrastructure, platform and software as a service, you can do anything in the cloud that you would do in-house. The advantage is that the cloud is often far, far away.

Why choose a cloud solution over doing it all yourself? Avoidance of enormous capital investment is a very good reason. It’s not hard to spend millions creating the environmentally controlled and secure facilities with robust backup power and multiple diverse bandwidth connections, not to mention the racks and racks of equipment inside. This is one reason why many businesses decide that regular system backups are good enough. If the worst happens, they’ll simply get an insurance settlement and order replacement equipment. Oh? How long will that take? Just what is your income stream going to look line in the ensuing days, weeks or months?

One advantage of the cloud is that it scales fast. You could decide to have a minimal cloud solution implemented right now for the monthly fee it takes for storage and limited server capacity. If you get knocked out where are, you can log-into the cloud from wherever you can get a broadband connection and scale up in minutes or hours. When the crises is over, you can back off from all the virtual servers and go into a standby mode.

By the way, that cloud storage makes an excellent backup for your local files. Cloud storage is robust and almost infinitely scalable. This alone can be the justification for having a backup operation in the cloud.

What if you are in the cloud already? It’s not unknown for cloud systems to suffer outages just like anything else technical. In this case you may want to have a minimal backup system locally, in a colocation facility or set up as a private cloud in a different data center.

Hosted PBX phone systems can also keep you running after a disaster, almost like nothing ever happened. At least that’s the way your customers will perceive. it. You only need a network bandwidth connection and a few SIP phones to get your calls and voicemail. Being a network voice system, those SIP phones can be located just about anywhere... even somewhere else in the country.

Are you apprehensive that your business may not be protected from shutdown as much as you’d like? It may not be that expensive to have backup computing and telephone service in the cloud. Check options and prices now and rest easier that you have a recovery solution.

Hosted Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is getting a lot of interest today for good reason. As stagnated economic conditions become the new normal, the attractiveness of pay as you go computing becomes more compelling. Combine that with near instant scalability and you have a computing environment that has a cost related to your level of business activity, with little or no need for planned investments. There are other advantages, too. These have to do with disaster recovery and business telephone infrastructure.

Let’s take disaster recovery. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and fires are real threats to company data centers. What happens if you get wiped out? You can rebuild, of course. But how long is that going to take and how do you do business in the meantime?

Cloud computing can come to the rescue. The infrastructure is already in place. All you need to do is sign up for service and upload your software and data files. You DO have backups stored remotely, right? Perhaps that’s another good argument for having at least some computing or storage in the cloud. A local disaster probably won’t affect a remote data center.

Company telephone systems are also local infrastructure intensive. They require investment, maintenance, repaid and eventual replacement. Once again, if a local disaster strikes your phones can be down for the long haul. A Hosted PBX system is the voice equivalent of cloud computing. You pay by the seat by the month for switching services and a rich feature set. The provider takes care of all equipment, sometimes including the actual phones in the monthly service fee.

Cloud services comprise a wide diversity in types of services available and in the mix of private vs public clouds. Yes, you can own and run your own cloud. If your company is large enough to justify the investment and expense and you want total control, it is certainly feasible to set up your data centers under a cloud model. What this involves is redundancy in hardware and extensive virtualization. You need enough resources on standby to ensure that you can accommodate failures plus any swing in workload demand. If you run out of resources, it’s not much of a cloud.

The other extreme is to outsource everything to a public cloud. You wind up with no servers or storage and only need to bring your applications software and a high bandwidth, low latency connection. The cloud provider ensures there is sufficient capacity in the system to serve all users. That includes being able to scale to meet increasing demand and bursting to handle short term peaks.

A full public cloud makes companies with large and critical needs a bit nervous. Murphy’s Law has been known to strike everywhere, including Amazon’s massive cloud structure. There’s also anxiety over security. Determined hackers seem to find their way into anything where there’s even the slightest opportunity. You can claim military grade encryption all you want, but it’s tough to prove that break-ins are impossible and will always be impossible.

For those reasons, large operations are leaning to the hybrid cloud model with some resources local and others off in the cloud. There are a couple of other approaches to keeping everything with your own walls. One is to have someone else build and operate a private cloud for you. That’s a cloud-modeled computing environment but dedicated to your exclusive use. The private cloud can be hosted in a secure colocation facility close to high bandwidth providers. You not only offload the cost of ownership and maintenance, but can probably save on bandwidth costs too.

The other hosted solution is to create your own cloud, but do within the colo center using rented equipment. In this case, you are still responsible for the design and resource allocation of the hosted cloud, but it’s all done on a pay by the month basis rather than capital investment.

Are you interested in giving cloud computing a role in your business strategy? If so, compare features and costs for cloud hosted voice and data services to meet your business needs.

Cloud Communications Advantages Explained

Many companies are scratching their heads, wondering if it makes sense to move their communications to the cloud. XO Communications, a major competitive networking and telecom services provider, has a quick explanation of just why moving to the cloud makes sense. Take a minute and a half and see if this looks like something you should be doing...



XO’s Enterprise Cloud Communications does for multi-location businesses what basic hosted PBX services do for the SMB. It gets the organization out of the business of owning and managing a telephone system and into the role of a service user, albeit a sophisticated one.

By moving to a cloud hosted PBX and connecting via the extensive XO network from each location, you gain advanced features while keeping your calls “on net” to avoid telco toll charges. In addition to the usual local and long distance calling with standard business phone features, you gain high definition voice and video enterprise-wide and the ability to move calls seamlessly from your mobile phone to a fixed phone. Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) lets you make and receive calls from any device at any location with only one phone number, dial plan and voice mailbox.

Regardless of how many regional and branch offices you have and where they are, you may be able to integrate your entire operation in the XO cloud and avoid the headaches of capital investment, ongoing maintenance, full time staffing and periodic upgrades. All of that responsibility moves to the provider and you have peace of mind of knowing what it’s going to cost per employee per month.

Does cloud communications sound like it might be the right next move for your company? If so, get complete features, pricing and consultation for cloud networking services now. There are advantages for all size companies from small offices on up to the largest corporations.

SMB Phone System Needs Only Phones

Anyone who wrestles with programming and maintaining an in-house phone system occasionally longs for the days when you just plugged in the phone, lifted the receiver and there was dial tone. Those days have returned with the rise of cloud communications systems.

The magic is in moving the complicated switching equipment to a service provider who keeps it up to date, well maintained and easily expanded when your needs change. The name of this service is Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. The hosted part means that someone else provides the bulk of the telephone system and the connectivity to the public switched telephone network. What you have in-house is the telephones.

These aren’t just any phones. They are IP phones designed to connect to computer networks rather than plugging into a phone outlet. The electrical signals are completely different, but then so are the connectors. That little RJ-11 telephone plug? It’s been replaced by a fatter RJ-45 plug. Does it look familiar? That’s because this is the same connector used by most computer equipment. In fact, your telephone has become a networked device, just like a PC or printer.

In a typical hosted VoIP system, you have a converged voice and data network that connects to both your telephones and other computer equipment. There are no separate telephone wires. Convergence is the process of making sure that one network can handle the very different requirements of data and voice. Phone conversations are very sensitive to network limitations such as latency, jitter and congestion that don’t bother data transfers or Internet access.

Does that mean that there is a problem with having broadband Internet access on the same network with your telephones? Not necessarily. In fact, the best enterprise VoIP solutions have voice, video, Internet, file transfers and other processes running simultaneously without conflict. The trick is engineering QoS or Quality of Service into the network so that different classes of packets don’t interfere. Just plugging everything into the LAN and hoping for the best is going to cause problems.

One trick in making VoIP work for business is to keep the telephone service off the Internet but allow the two to co-exist otherwise. Why? Because the Internet is great for data connections and one-way downloads of media such as audio and video. It’s the instantaneous two-way nature of phone conversations that can get compromised on a network designed for one way transfers that take whatever time is required to ensure every packet is sent and received correctly.

There’s a service of special interest to small and medium size businesses called SIP Trunking. A SIP trunk is the broadband connection between you and your service provider. This is a private line connection that is engineered to carry both phone service and broadband Internet. The two share the line but don’t Interfere. They are split at the service provider’s end, with the phone lines going to the hosted PBX and the broadband routed to the Internet.

Would you like to have only telephones to deal with in your business and leave management of the telephone system to someone else? If so, then it pays to look into Hosted VoIP Solutions to get the features you want without the cost and complexity of an in-house phone system.

Fixed Mobile Convergence Includes Android and iPhone

When we think of network convergence, it is generally in terms of engineering the LAN, MAN and WAN to support voice, video and data. Network convergence is at the heart of the productivity and cost savings offered by enterprise VoIP solutions. Even so, there is still one piece missing. That’s the mobile phone. This is where FMC or Fixed Mobile Convergence comes into play.

The idea behind FMC is that cell phones, especially smartphones, are now so ubiquitous that they have to be included in the corporate communications structure or there will be a big hole in the system. It’s especially true for sales people, field engineers, and anyone else who spends a significant amount of time out of the office and away from the desk phone. It’s also true, perhaps unfortunately, that we’re in a 24/7 world where important calls may come in at any time.

Some employees handle this situation with workarounds, such as setting up the office phone to forward to their cell phone when they leave the office. That’s fine when they remember. If not, voice mail becomes the communications method of last resort. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have the office phone system extended to include your mobile phone?

Smoothstone IP Communications thinks so and is now making their Mobile Connect app available to both Android and iPhone using customers. What Mobile Connect does integrate your smartphone into the enterprise communications platform. You then have one number, your work number, that rings on both your desk phone and your cell phone. When you place an outgoing call, the Caller ID reflects your work number, not your personal mobile number. Other calling features include access to the company directory, low cost international calling, 4-digit on-net dialing, visual voice mail and one-touch access to listen to and manipulate voice mail messages.

There are also advanced features from Smoothstone’s VoiceMAXX system that carry over to Mobile Connect. These include call recording and centralized call detail reporting.

VoiceMAXX is Smoothstone’s cloud based PBX telephone system. It relieves businesses of the need to invest in and maintain an on-premises PBX system, yet has the flexibility to integrate with and extend an existing PBX.

Cloud hosted PBX is a pay-as-you go proposition that easily scales to include more users as needed. With a cloud solution, you don’t have to over-provision your system to allow for growth. You simply buy more capacity as you need it. You also don’t have the agony of a “fork lift upgrade” that involves ripping out your old PBX and replacing it with a new one of higher capacity, more modern design or more features. All of those capital investment, installation, upgrades and daily maintenance tasks are taken care of by the cloud service provider. You just concentrate on those things that advance the business you are in.

Is your existing business telephone system creaking at the seams, or are you ready for the higher productivity that comes from advanced features such as fixed mobile convergence? If so, learn more and get pricing for cloud hosted PBX telephone services scaled to match the needs of your business, be it small, medium or enterprise level.

VoIP Phone Service Provides Flexibility

Small to medium size businesses may be thinking about upgrading their aging phone systems, but uncertain about which way to go. Do they buy a modernized and expanded version of the Key Telephone or PBX system they are using and keep everything else the same, or make the jump to VoIP phone service? What many may not realize is the flexibility of options you gain with VoIP solutions.

What differentiates VoIP from traditional telephone equipment and service is that it is network based. True, even a single line analog desk phone or cell phone is part of a network - the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The public telephone network is a very specific network that does one thing really well. It connects one telephone to another or perhaps one phone to a group of other phones for a conference call. It has its own technology and wiring standards. VoIP, on the other hand, is designed to share standard packet based computer networks.

There-in lies the flexibility of VoIP. You plug an IP phone into a network jack, just like you’d plug in a PC or printer. No separate wiring scheme is needed. It doesn’t even matter where the phone is located. IP phones are known by their unique addresses, not which pair of wires they happen to be connected to.

With analog telephones, you have a choice on whether to connect each of your phones to the telephone company on their own line or to install an in-house phone system to connect the phones and share the outside lines. With VoIP, you can also install an in-house phone system called an IP PBX or extend your network with all the phones to a service provider. This approach is called Hosted VoIP or Hosted PBX. The connection is called a SIP Trunk.

SIP Trunking gives smaller businesses the option of getting both their phone service and broadband service from the same provider. The SIP trunk can be divided so that voice packets and data packets don’t interfere. Your phone calls are never interrupted by someone download data at the same time. Using one trunk for both voice and data often results in a cost savings over having separate telephone lines and broadband connections.

Hosted PBX services give you the flexibility of locating your phones wherever you want them. This goes beyond just moving telephones around the building. You can have one phone sitting on a desk in New York and other in Seattle, both connected by SIP trunks to a hosted PBX in Dallas. From the caller’s perspective, all of this equipment could be in one building. They have no perception of how geographically spread out this operation is. This capability is also known as a virtual office.

For larger companies, enterprise level VoIP systems handle hundreds or even thousands of phones located at headquarters, regional sales offices and branch offices nationwide. Private SIP Trunks securely transport voice and data among the locations, avoiding telephone company toll charges for in-house calls. The PBX switching system can be located at any particular location or can be a hosted solution. The beauty of hosted VoIP is that you pay as you go. There is no need for an expensive investment in telephone switching equipment nor the staff to maintain and upgrade it. That’s all handled for you.

Can your company benefit from a more flexible communications system, perhaps including mobile phones as well as desk sets? If so, get pricing and features quotes for competing VoIP service providers. Then compare with what you have now and see if you can gain flexibility and perhaps cost savings as well.

Where Hosted PBX Solutions Save

Business telephone systems range from the very simple with a few phones and a few lines to complex private branch exchanges that support multiple sites. The new approach is a hosted PBX that makes things simple again. But do hosted PBX solutions really save anything and can they maintain voice quality?

With the simplest arrangement of a single landline phone connected to the local phone company, there really isn’t much to manage. You pay so much per month for “dial tone” that makes your phone work and gives you typically unlimited local calling. You have the option to switch to a different provider for long distance service or use a dial-around service for international calling. These are options to save you on the per minute calling rates.

The basic analog or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone service seems simple because all the complexity is at the other end of the wire. What you don’t see or have to deal with is the intricacies of connecting your line to any of billions worldwide or to even more billions of wireless callers. If you have, say, 3 business locations with 1 phone each, they talk to each other by dialing up the desired location just like any other phone number.

Businesses found out just how complex the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) was when they got big enough to have lots of desk phones and a dozen or more outside lines. What many companies did was to buy their own telephone switching system called a PBX (Private Branch Exchange.) The advantage of having your own PBX system is that calls within the company stay on your own wiring and you don’t have to pay the telephone company to connect them. That includes more complex PBX arrangements with digital tie lines that connect multiple locations in a private network. Once again, the motivation is to keep as many calls as possible off the public network to avoid “toll” charges.

Many companies have rued the day the got into the telephone business. PBX systems are expensive to buy and need constant updates as employees move within the company. There is also maintenance activity for both the PBX and its telephone network wiring.

Hosted PBX is a fairly new service that offers to offload the expense of in-house phone systems. It only became possible when most companies installed Local Area Networks for their computers and the price of private digital lines became affordable. The enabling technology is VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. In this case, Internet refers to the technology standard and not necessarily use of the public Internet.

Hosted PBX refers to using a large PBX telephone system that is located or hosted by a third-party service provider. This PBX is big enough to handle the telephone traffic of many different companies to gain an economy of scale. In a way, this is similar to going back to the days where each phone was individually connected to a local telephone company that took care of call switching.

So, where does the cost savings come from? Network consolidation is one area. Both telephones and computers run on a single converged voice and data network. There are no separate telephone wires. This network is extended to the hosted PBX provider using a private digital line called a SIP trunk. You are not tied to a particular service provider. There are many competing hosted PBX solutions and that competition is another way that cost savings can be offered.

The private SIP trunk helps to maintain high voice quality because it provides the characteristics of low latency, jitter, packet loss and congestion, along with quality of service mechanisms that keep data packets from interfering with voice packets. You can also buy Internet based hosted PBX services at lower costs, but the vagaries of the public Internet can introduce distortion and clipping in the conversations.

Do hosted PBX solutions offer a real cost savings for your company? It depends on how many seats you have, what features you want and what your existing system is costing you. If you are close to replacing an aging PBX or one that has run out of capacity, the economics highly favor hosted solutions. To decide for yourself, get competitive pricing on hosted PBX solutions for business. It may come down to whether you want to pay as you go versus investing in your own in-house phone system.

SMB Cloud Computing Portfolio

Cloud computing has come to the enterprise in a big way, but how about the small to medium size businesses? Does anyone offer a portfolio of cloud services that make sense for these companies?

Just such a collection of integrated cloud services is now available from Broadview Networks. Broadview is a communications provider serving the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States. They offer a wide variety of connectivity that includes the popular T1 and bonded T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper, Metro Fiber Ethernet, MPLS networking, SIP Trunking and even POTS lines.

What makes Broadview Networks particularly interesting as a cloud services provider is that they already have the connectivity you need to get to the cloud. Many cloud computing companies offer only the infrastructure, platform or software as a service. It’s up to you to figure out how you’ll reliably connect to their cloud. Broadview can give you both the services and the high reliability connections that make it all work seamlessly.

Cloud communications, also called Hosted PBX, moves the telephone switching system and its network out of your facilities and to the service provider. Your handsets connect directly to your LAN, along with your PCs, printers and other network equipment. An advantage of Hosted PBX is that you don’t need the capital investment, maintenance and dedicated staff to have an enterprise phone system for your business. That’s all handled by the service provider.

Broadview Networks offers Hosted PBX for the SMB, but also has a new portfolio of cloud computing services. These include Hosted Business E-Mail, Office Anywhere, Hosted SharePoint, Cloud Backup and Recovery, and both Virtual and Dedicated Servers. All of these help you increase productivity without the traditional capital expenditures.

Broadview’s Hosted Business E-mail is a managed email solution that gives you enterprise-grade e-mail functions that include contacts, calendaring, notes, tasks and folders. If you wish, you can expand this functionality with Hosted Microsoft Exchange 2010 to gain shared contacts, cross-user tasks, distribution lists, group calendaring, plus archival, compliance and eDiscovery options. You control everything through an administrator portal that lets you quickly and easily add or delete e-mail boxes.

Office Anywhere uses Citrix 6.0 to virtualize your desktop environment so that user applications and data reside in the cloud. This is especially valuable for mobile workers and business with multiple locations, in that documents and applications can be accessed through a simple Web browser anywhere in the world. No need to worry about individual file backups. All data is automatically backed up in the cloud and easily recovered when needed.

Broadview’s Hosted Microsoft SharePoint 2010 helps your team collaborate in a secure real-time environment. That includes road warriors, home-based employees and remotely located colleagues. The SharePoint environment lets them collaborate and create as if they are all located in the same room. Team members can view, comment and edit the same document, speeding the process of document creation, review and revision.

Do you still want to maintain your own servers or create a hybrid public and private cloud with some of your own equipment augmented by on-demand cloud services? Either way, you need a robust backup and recovery system to protect your valuable business information files. Broadview’s Cloud Data Backup and Recovery gives you the ability to backup your data to a high performance data center in the cloud. You’ll have secure off-site disaster recovery and backup with on-demand provisioning of extra storage. In addition to backing up your mission critical servers, you can also backup up employee’s workstations and laptops from anywhere in the world. No need to worry about losing a laptop and its valuable data or suffering an untimely disk failure. Your data is easily recovered from the cloud so you can continue operations.

Broadview is also a colocation hosting services provider. They offer virtualized or dedicated servers secured in SAS 70 Type II-certified data centers. You have your choice of Windows or Linux operating systems running on HP and Cisco servers.

Have you been curious about what a move to the cloud can do for your business? Regardless of size, there are cloud services scaled to meet your needs. Check out pricing and availability for SMB cloud computing services now to assist your tradeoff analysis.



Note: Background cloud photo courtesy of NASA Goddard.

Enterprise Cloud Communications Arrives

Cloud computing has been in the headlines as the next generation of information technology. What’s breaking out now is cloud communications, a move to make telephony as well as number crunching and file serving available as cloud services. You know it’s arrived when a provider the size of XO Communications launches an enterprise level cloud communications service.

In an odd way, what’s new is old. The origin of telephone services is in a cloud called the PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network. Your basic phone is simply a client that derives its functionality from the massive telco switching network.

Then came in-house phone systems in the form of key telephone systems and PBX or Private Branch Exchange systems. These are essentially small phone companies that you own and maintain. All calls within the company stay on the internal system. It’s only when you need connectivity to the outside world that you have to rejoin the PSTN.

Telephone services are now moving back to the cloud, but with a difference. This time it's IP communications rather than switched circuits. It’s also not about a monolithic public network but private networking services with competitive features that go way beyond what the original telephone network was engineered to provide.

The new cloud communications offerings also go by the title of hosted PBX. The idea is that it is more efficient to establish a large IP switching center with a dedicated expert staff than for every business to be its own telephone company. The business users need only have the telephone handsets, speakerphone and similar desk equipment connected to their local networks. The large, expensive and hard to maintain switch moves out to the cloud.

Therein lies the key to cloud communications. It’s the rise of converged IP networks to handle voice, video and data, replacing separate dedicated networks for each. Once you’ve installed SIP phones on your LAN, it seems a bit inefficient to send that traffic to an in-house IP PBX system that connects to the PSTN with specialized analog and digital trunk lines. Why not keep all of the traffic on the converged network as long as possible?

That’s what XO says. They’ve built their business by creating an enormous fiber optic network footprint to provide digital connectivity to both businesses and other service providers. With an extensive converged network already in place, it’s logical for XO to add value by providing telephony solutions in their cloud. This way you have only one supplier for both network connectivity and the communication services running on that network.

The enterprise cloud communications model works especially well for companies with more than one business location. XO can tie your headquarters, regional offices and branches together as if they were in a single large facility. The converged WAN network give you all the standard calling features you expect in an enterprise telephone system plus high definition video conferencing and the ability to include mobile phones in a unified communications system. These communications services are priced on a per-seat-per-month basis.

Are you interested in upgrading your business communications while avoiding a massive capital investment? Look into future proofing your voice, data and video with hosted services in the cloud. Get pricing, features and availability on SMB and enterprise cloud communications services now.



Note: Photo of clouds and building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Fixed Mobile Convergence Comes To the Cloud

Most business professionals today are toting smartphones as well as tablets and netbooks or laptop computers. At the office, there’s a large monitor desktop computer connected to the company LAN and a desk speakerphone. The challenge? How do you make these devices part of a unified whole?

This is the challenge corporate IT departments have been wrestling with as the variety of communications devices has multiplied faster than the means to interconnect them. Many times, the best option is to print new business cards with separate listings for office phone, mobile, FAX, toll free and email. Did you get an important call on your office phone while you were offsite making a presentation? Oops. You’ll get it when you get back to the desk tomorrow. Or you can call in and check your voice mails tonight, write down the number and then call back the client when business hours resume. Just hope your competition didn’t return the call sooner.

Modern solutions to this dilemma of integrating disparate tools into a common business system include enterprise VoIP, unified communications and fixed mobile convergence. Getting wireline or network voice telephony to mesh with cellular phones has been a particularly knotty problem. The one area of commonality has been the public switched telephone network. But the PSTN likes each device to have its own phone number. What if you want one number to be able to reach you no matter where you are or what phone is handy?

Smoothstone IP Communications specializes in converging voice and data networks.
They were first to introduce a converged voice and data service over an MPLS network. One of their specialties is hosted PBX or cloud based telephony. The beauty of hosted PBX is that you no longer need make a major capital investment every few years just to expand or improve your in-house telephone system. The expensive and complex switching system is provided as a service over a SIP trunk from Smoothstone to your company.

What’s new is that Smoothstone and Sprint are now partnering to include cell phones and smartphones within the cloud-based telephone system. Users get to have a single phone number, a single voice mail, abbreviated dialing plans and sophisticated group and personal call controls that would normally be available only within the office environment.

What’s tricky about this is to maintain full QoS or Quality of Service controls to ensure that voice services maintain enterprise levels of quality regardless of whether they are being handled wirelessly or through the company’s converged voice and data network. This is where the integration of Smoothstone’s cloud services and Sprint’s 3G, 4G and Global MPLS networks seamlessly manage voice and data communications.

From a user or IT management perspective, the complexity of FMC is moved to the cloud where it is fully managed by the service providers. At the same time, Smoothstone’s other cloud based communications services are available as needed by a single office or a geographically diverse workforce.

Has your company hit a frustration level caused by yesterday’s voice and data networking solutions trying to meet today’s needs? Don’t try to re-engineer and finance a complete overhaul until you look at the options available to you with converged cloud-based voice and data network services. Check pricing and availability with a quick inquiry right now.

Broadview Networks OfficeSuite Brings The Cloud To SMB

As a small to medium size business, you’d like to embrace cost saving technologies like Enterprise VoIP, private IP networking and cloud services. But, oh, the investment to get into this game. You take another look at Internet-based services, but have serious concerns about quality and reliability of service. If only small to medium businesses without huge IT staffs could get the good stuff. But, wait, you can!

You can, indeed, upgrade to the latest in sophisticated telecommunications services without the big investment in dollars and staffing to do it all yourself. Broadview Networks has exactly the service you need in their OfficeSuite. It IS your office at one or many locations. You get the functionality of an enterprise-grade PBX or key telephone system. You get easy administration to add stations, sites and users through an ordinary Web browser. You get the ability to connect satellite and regional offices across the country with your main office using the same system and network. You get seamless communications with home-based employees and mobile professionals who have the same features and functionalities that are available on their office phones. You even get Internet access.

What you don’t get is grief and capital expenditures. OfficeSuite is a hosted VoIP system. That means that all the expensive and hard to maintain switching and server equipment is located in a Broadview Networks facility. They have the telecom talent to keep everything working 24/7 and enough resources to ensure that you can scale up your operation any time you want. What you have in your facility is telephones and computers connected to your 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps Ethernet LAN.

Now, be careful here. Not all hosted PBX solutions are the same. Some try to minimize costs by pressing the Internet into service as a telephone trunk line. Broadview Networks operates its own private network built on a redundant fiber-optic backbone. The difference between sending sensitive traffic, like telephone calls, over the wild and wooly Internet and sending them over a carefully controlled private network is the difference between take-what-you-get and dependable high quality performance. Broadview Networks can interconnect multiple locations through their converged MPLS network that maintains strict quality control on voice and data streams.

With advanced technology and quality networking, OfficeSuite offers not only the usual telephone features, but exciting extras that can improve your productivity. Hot Desking lets employees move around the office and between locations. They simply log in to a phone like they would log into an Internet account. Click to Dial lets you click on phone numbers in your Microsoft Outlook contact manager to immediately activate a speakerphone and call the contact selected. Get voicemail notifications and messages from any phone and receive messages through e-mail, even on your smartphone. Decide where to send calls if you can’t pick up. Inbound callers reach your Auto Attendant that prompts them to user extensions and company directories.

Are you ready for a more sophisticated phone system, or perhaps one that is easier to manage and doesn’t require you to run to the bank for a capital loan? Then get complementary consulting and quotes on OfficeSuite and other quality hosted PBX phone systems. You’ll likely find that trying to be your own phone company is more trouble that it is worth.

Cloud Networking Services Extend Business Footprint

If you have a single office in a single city, you may have need for cloud computing or hosted PBX, aka telephony in the cloud. But chances are your communications needs are more about connecting to a service provider’s cloud than requiring a cloud of your own. It’s quite different for companies with multiple business locations. Cloud networking services are just what you need to interconnect two or more locations so they can act as one.

What is cloud networking? It is the use of public or private networks that connect geographically diverse sites on a one to one, one to many or many to many basis. The Internet is a cloud. So are privately run MPLS networks and their Frame Relay predecessors. You can even create your own cloud, if you like. You do this by leasing dedicated lines between locations and setting up your own routing scheme to determine how locations may communicate.

In fact, the ad-hoc private network is how many growing businesses get started with multi-location connections. They start off with a T1 point to point data line that connects their main office to a branch site. As more offices or retail locations are added, more lines are connected. At some point, you are dealing with a spider’s web of private lines that need constant management and are costing a small fortune.

This is where cloud networks shine. The idea behind the cloud is that costs are amortized by users sharing the resources of the cloud. Each user is required to provide a connection from each of their desired locations to the cloud network. The connections between locations and the transport of voice, data or video through the shared portion of the network is the responsibility of the cloud. The name “cloud” comes from the convention of drawing this shared network in the shape of a cumulus cloud. It signifies that you don’t manage what goes on in there. That’s someone else’s job.

Actually, you do need to be concerned about what’s going on in that cloud even though you don’t directly operate or control it. You don’t want your valuable information damaged or intercepted during the transport process. Take the biggest cloud in the world, the Internet. It has the advantages of being near universally available and relatively cheap to use. But the Internet also has the disadvantages of being a “best effort” service with no guaranteed performance parameters and enough security concerns to give you pause. How can anyone use the Internet for serious business applications?

In some cases you can’t. Two-way real-time applications have a tough time with the unpredictable performance that is inherent in the design of the Internet cloud. But it still works just fine for Web access, email, small scale data backup to remote servers, and one-way video that is properly buffered. In fact, your business probably needs access to the Internet just to communicate with customers, place orders or do research. If you are going to send sensitive business data between locations using the Internet cloud, however, you’ll need to protect yourself by encrypting those packets so they can’t be read by unintended parties. That process is called tunneling. The overall connection is called IP VPN. VPN, meaning Virtual Private Network.

If the internet is too flakey or scary to support your business, the cloud you’ll be most interested in is called MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching. This is a privately run network with a regional or nationwide footprint. The combination of private ownership and proprietary technology means that performance can be guaranteed and security is inherently better than the public Internet. That’s why MPLS networks are also called MPLS VPN networks, even without packet encryption. Of course you can still encrypt your data to add even more security... something of a belt and suspenders approach.

A specialized type of cloud networking is telephone service. Instead of hooking all your phones with individual lines to the local phone company or managing an in-house PBX system, you connect your phones to the cloud using SIP trunks. This is also called hosted PBX. Users that all connect to the same cloud may communicate over this private network. When you need to make or receive calls with the general public, those calls are connected to the public telephone network by the service provider.

Can your company benefit from cloud networking or better cloud services? It’s fast and easy to find out. Just take a second and put in an inquiry for availability and pricing of competitive cloud networking services.

Fixed Wireless Broadband Services For Business

We’ve come to think of business grade telecom services and copper wireline and fiber optic services. That’s why IT managers may cringe when someone says they’ve got to have new high bandwidth Internet access, point to point transmission or VoIP telephone service right this minute. We all know that there is no such thing in WAN networking as right this minute. Or is there?

An option that’s becoming increasingly available is fixed wireless service. Think of getting the same bandwidth services you have now delivered without the wires. This is quite different from cell phone service designed for mobile use or wireless access points that have a range of only a few hundred feet. It’s also not satellite broadband, which has such long latencies and limited bandwidth that you can’t really use it for any but the most limited applications.

This fixed wireless service uses outside antennas that communicate over a range of some miles. Airband, a leader in this field, has installed base stations in 14 major cities. Each base station can communicate with customers up to 5 miles away, forming a service footprint of 78 square miles. Each customer has a subscriber unit (SU) that provides a two-way radio connection with the base station and a simple Ethernet connection to the LAN.

What services can Airband offer? Broadband Internet is a popular choice. You can get speeds from 2 Mbps to Gigabit Ethernet. Yes, you can get replacement service for T1 lines and DS3 connections. But there is also the standard Ethernet speeds of 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps and 1000 Mbps. Plus you can choose any bandwidth in-between to scale your service to exactly what you need. Don’t worry about picking the wrong bandwidth level and needing an upgrade quickly. Upgrades are made by network software changes and can be accomplished in hours. Installation itself can be completed in just days. What’s that quote you got to bring in fiber? Six months? Outrageous!

Being wireless, can’t anyone just stick up an antenna and intercept your datastream? They won’t have much luck. Airband uses 128 bit AES encryption to keep your data safe. They also offer a 100% uptime guarantee, with service level guarantees on jitter, latency and packet loss.

With such tight control on network parameters, this fixed wireless solution can be used with confidence for VoIP as well as point to point data, business Internet and private IP VPN. There are several options available. You can simply replace your existing ISDN PRI trunk lines (or add new ones) using a SIP trunk with PRI interface. The newer IP PBX systems can often connect directly to a SIP trunk. Or let Airband own and manage the hosted PBX system and just have telephone sets at your location. This is all done on a private IP network so that the quality of your voice communication is assured.

Does this sound like the quality of service you need with the speed of installation and avoidance of copper and fiber line construction costs you require? If so, you may be delighted with how little you have to pay to enjoy fixed wireless services from Airband and other providers. Get details on fixed wireless costs and availability now.