Business VoIP Solution Options

You may be considering a move from a traditional analog or PBX business phone system to VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol telephony. Before you jump into a major “forklift upgrade,” you should know that there are a number of good business VoIP solutions to consider. Which one you pick will depend on your particular situation. Pick the right one and you’ll get the most for your telephony dollar.

Why even consider VoIP in the first place? The reason is to save money, add calling features or both. Let’s start with the needs of very small businesses and work our way up to enterprise solutions.

The smaller businesses will have one to four outgoing phone lines and under 10 handsets. This is typical of small sales offices, retail stores and independent professionals. You may well be using individual analog phone lines and perhaps 2 or 4 line phones that you can buy at office supply stores.

A system this small doesn’t justify a PBX phone system or PRI digital trunking. But you do have the option to change to a broadband phone or SIP trunking solution. Broadband phone is typified by the Phone Power VoIP service. You connect a device called an ATA or Analog Telephone Adaptor to your broadband service, typically Cable Internet, and plug one or two telephones plus your computer or router into the ATA. You no longer need an analog telephone line because your broadband connection is used for both phone and Internet. A typical small office VoIP service plan costs $14.95 a month, but temporary special offers can make this even cheaper.

A step up from single phone number VoIP is called SIP trunking. This service uses a T1 line or other business grade private line to provide multiple line telephone service plus broadband to a small to medium size business. By using dynamic bandwidth management, phone calls have all the bandwidth they require for maximum call quality. Remaining bandwidth is assigned to Internet access. As calls hang up, the bandwidth they were using is automatically or dynamically reassigned for Internet service. This way the full capacity of the line is always put to good use.

Companies large enough to have an in-house key telephone or PBX system generally have many handsets and at least 6 to 10 outside lines. If your system is getting to the end of its useful life, you have the choice of replacing it with a newer IP PBX system or going with a hosted PBX solution. Hosted PBX means that you don’t have any PBX equipment in-house. Your service provider connects to SIP telephones or analog phones with adaptors on your LAN and performs both the internal and external call switching.

Enterprise VoIP telephony also consists of using SIP telephones in place of regular telephone handsets. These SIP phones allow you to converge your telephone and computer networks into a single LAN for both voice and data. You can choose to host an IP PBX system in-house or elect to go with a hosted PBX solution. The tradeoff is capital equipment cost and online maintenance versus paying a monthly fee to a service provider. Think of hosted PBX as a cloud service for business telephony. Even if you install and operate your own IP PBX system, you still have the option to use SIP trunking to connect with a service provider that will terminate outside calls to the public telephone system. The more traditional solution is to use ISDN PRI telephone trunks for the same purpose.

Which VoIP solution, if any, make the most sense for your organization? There are a lot of variables involved and many suppliers. Why not let an experienced Telarus telecom consultant help you compare costs and features of business VoIP solutions? Then make an informed decision to get the most for your telecom budget.

What XO’s 1,000,000 VoIP Customers Predicts

XO Communications, a major competitive telecom carrier, recently achieved the milestone of reaching 1,000,000 business VoIP end users.



What should be noted is that it came as a surprise, even to XO, that the millionth customer would arrive in only 5 years. You may have raised an eyebrow, too, if you’ve been struggling with the decision on whether or not to embrace enterprise VoIP technology. We’ve all been on calls with someone using a poorly implemented VoIP solution and have been repelled by the distortion, voice clipping, noise modulation and even dropped calls of VoIP done badly. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. After all, a million business customers must know something, right?

What they know is that professional grade communications solutions are carefully engineered to accommodate the needs of the technology. For instance, XO’s IP Flex service is implemented over a T1 line or similar commercial bandwidth connection. Terminal equipment on both ends ensures that voice packets have the bandwidth, latency, and jitter characteristics they need to travel unscathed from user to service provider. They are protected from interference by data transfers by giving voice priority over data. The circuit is engineered to ensure that you can have all the telephone calls you need in progress simultaneously and still have adequate bandwidth for high speed Internet service on the same line.

The secret to enterprise VoIP is in careful control of the network. That network must include your converged LAN plus the link to your telephone and Internet service provider. SIP Trunking, a larger scale version of integrated voice and data lines, even allows you to include multiple business locations on the same outgoing phone lines. Internal calls stay on your network and avoid telco toll charges completely.

There is a future to telecommunications services, and the million XO VoIP customers shows that we are moving to an IP-centric business environment faster than most of us realize. Those who have made the switch are now enjoying the twin benefits of added services and lower costs.

Is your business, large or small, looking at ways to save on your monthly telecom expenses while maintaining quality of service? If so, then get competitive quotes on Enterprise VoIP Voice and Data Services.

Free Help On Your Telecom Needs

How would you like to hire some help for free? Not just any help, mind you, but high quality technical expertise to assist you with your telephone and computer networks. No out of pocket cost today or ever. Do you think that offer works well with today’s shrunken personnel budgets?

I’ll bet you do. In fact, you are probably chafing at the bit to find out where you can get some of this help before it’s all gone. Well, relax. There’s plenty to go around.

How can this be true? After all, if you expect to get a service then you also expect to pay for it. You can’t get something for nothing, can you? Yes, you can, if someone else is paying the bill.

Perplexed? Don’t be. What I’m talking about is a telecom brokerage service that has a large group of expert consultants in telephony, computer networking, international network services, wireless business solutions and the like. They stand ready to work with you right now, if only you would let them know what you need. You don’t have to be too specific. Just type a sentence or two to give them the general gist of what you are after. Someone will email or call you shortly to work through the details.

What happens after that? Your friendly consultant may take a few hours or even a couple of days to gather quotes of dozens of competitive service providers and sort out the best price/performance offers to present to you. This is the type of leg work your own staff would otherwise have to do... while you are paying them. No available IT staff to query dozens of potential suppliers in order to find the best match to your needs? Then you really need this service.

Some of these expert consultants routinely spend hours, even dozens of hours working on a single project for their client. How much do they bill per hour? Nothing at all. Oh, they get paid alright. But it’s not by you or any other end user. The brokerage service is paid by the service providers themselves in lieu of having to hire their own staff to do this work. You don’t get dinged with a higher price for service either. You’ll pay exactly the same as if you tracked down each competitive carrier or other service provider and ordered service directly from them without any outside assistance.

One other big advantage of working through a telecom broker is that they have the ability to compare and contrast offers from several to several dozen providers offering a suitable service for your business and location. They can keep a cool head sorting through the offers because they aren’t beholding to a particular vendor. They also know about special limited time offers being run by each providers, information you are unlikely to discover yourself.

So, whether you don’t have a staff or would just rather supplement their effort with free expert consulting service, you owe it to yourself and your bottom line to take advantage of this offer. Simply enter a brief online inquiry to describe your networking need and a friendly Telarus consultant will be touch pronto. You’ll be surprised at how much information you get for almost no effort on your part.

USA Digital Offers Comprehensive Call Center Services

Call centers and company contact centers have special requirements for the high volume telephony services they use. USA Digital serves this market with a suite of high performance cost effective telecom services.

USA Digital Communications Inc., often called USA Digital for short, is a licensed, certified carrier in all 50 states. Since founding in 1991, their business has been known for rapid growth and customer retention. Wouldn’t a lot of companies like to claim that? The secret to USA Digital’s success may be summed up as excellent customer service combined with an extensive range of services to support both voice and data needs.

Call center operations are a special focus for USA Digital. It starts with digital line services from T1 through OC12. T1 is a popular service and provided by many carriers. However, not all of those T1 services are optimized for cost on high volume calling. For instance, USA Digital offers initial six second billing minimum. That’s typical in the industry. But then USA Digital billing switches to one second increments. That alone can save you 30% in the cost of the minutes you use.

Another big saver is 4 digit versus 2 digit rounding. Those decimal points might seem arcane, but in high volume calling minor fractions of a second add up to big money. That’s especially true if 4 digital rounding is combined with low dedicated interstate rates on T1 service.

USA Digital has a service team experienced in provisioning voice lines, PRI’s, CO meet-point circuits, cross connects and SS7 links. That same experience is applied as you move up the circuit class to DS3 (T3) trunks and into the fiber optic services from OC3 to OC12. These OCx connections are truly business carrier class services needed by the largest call center operations and requiring the highest levels of expertise for support. An OC3 gives you the capacity of about 3 DS3’s and OC12 is the bandwidth of 4 OC3’s or 12 DS3’s. USA Digital can deliver OC3s in the form of 3 DS3’s that may be separated into individual T1 services.

In addition to bandwidth, dedicated outbound services are a specialty of USA Digital. They offer FTC telemarketing sale rule and do not call services to make sure you are in compliance with government regulations for outbound call centers. Their do not call services are capable of blocking 100% of calls registered to both state and national do-not-call lists. In addition, USA Digital provides customized Caller ID Service so that you can communicate appropriate caller information over your service lines.

USA Digital’s services are appropriate for in-house customer service contact centers up through major independent call centers and carriers, including ILEC, CLEC and wireless. Beyond traditional switched circuit voice trunks, they also support VoIP (SIP, H3223), point to point dedicated lines, and MPLS networks for linking multiple business locations.

Can you benefit from business telecom services like these? If so, you’ll want to get customized telecom service pricing and consultation for USA Digital and other competitive service providers as soon as possible. You could be looking a major cost savings.