What Every Company Needs To Know About Business VoIP And Unified Communications

A business voip solution is an alternative to a traditional switched-voice service. Instead of using dedicated trunks between PBXs, you can share the bandwidth with your data services, making better use of the available capacity. Also, in today’s business world the availability of a plethora of Unified Communications features within the VoIP ecosystem is a huge boon to business communications at all levels.

No matter which direction your business goes with a business VoIP solution… the key is understanding how you communicate and what you want to achieve.

The search for a business VoIP solution, or more appropriately Voice Over Internet Protocol, can confuse any business. There are many flavors of VoIP… and many pros and cons… that you need to be aware of when considering which service to choose. The goal of this article is to help you navigate through the technospeak so that you can make an informed decision that will save you time and money.

BUSINESS VOIP

The first thing you need to know about business VoIP Service is that it can replace your local phone company. Whether you have just one POTS (plain old telephone service) line… or a voice T1 (24 bundled dedicated lines)… a business VoIP solution is meant to replace your phone company. Instead of using your local phone company’s voice connection, VoIP will digitize your voice signal and send it over an internet connection.

In order for your voice to transmit digitally through the internet, you need to be sure you have enough bandwidth to facilitate the communication link. To optimize the quality of your business connection we recommend a minimum of a T1 Line (preferably ethernet fiber depending on the size of your enterprise) – a dedicated link directly to the internet that is guaranteed to be up over 99.999% of the time. Since you will be entrusting all of your business voice communication to this technology, your connection to the internet becomes the critical link. You don’t want to risk a company-wide phone outage to save a few hundred dollars on your bandwidth connection. So always opt for at least a T1 Line (preferably ethernet fiber) over DSL. It just makes business sense.

If you need assistance finding and provisioning bandwidth… we have developed software that will allow you to generate a circuit price in just seconds. You can request a bandwidth quote (as well as quotes for Business VoIP solutions) by simply asking at Business-VoIP-Solution.Com. Of course the quotes are free and no obligation. NOTE:… all circuits acquired through this resource also include FREE independent circuit monitoring.

Once you have your high-speed internet connection taken care of, it’s time to select a Business VoIP Service provider – the company that will actually route your digitized voice signal to a real telephone on the other end. In essence, your VoIP carrier will become your long distance carrier. The service providers we work with offer unlimited telephone calls to the United States and Canada, all for one fixed price. For companies who average more than $40 in local and long distance usage per employee, VoIP is well worth the initial investment. In some cases there are also very cost effective options for international calling also just ask if you’re interested.

There are likewise other hidden benefits of Business VoIP service, the main benefit being the reduced bandwidth required to conduct a regular telephone conversation. Since a VoIP transmission only requires 32KB of bandwidth, you can fix up to 24 ‘VoIP lines’ on a Data T1, and still have 768KB left over for dedicated high-speed internet access! This means that you can migrate your entire phone system on to your existing T1 and still have half of the bandwidth allocated for data.

Another benefit of VoIP lies in the prioritization of the digitized voice signals that are generated when you speak. In the event no one is talking, the VoIP line does not transmit any data. This allows your T1 Line to dynamically allocate bandwidth as it is needed, instead of permanently blocking out an entire channel of data.

Business VOIP means intelligent communications. Whether it is toll-bypass call routing, unified communications (integrated phone, email, IM, etc), or a specific application on the phone itself, the power of IPT is in the applications. In fact, the robust capabilities and functionality of the unified communications applications available are a real selling point in adopting Business VoIP.

In a highly mobile sales organization “find me follow me” functionality may be priceless. In an organization where deadlines have to be met, point and click call control settings may be crucial. Other organizations may benefit with high level call log metrics to track billable time. Enabling true mobility across your work force, enhancing video/conferencing activity, and easy use when traveling globally are also very attractive attributes to businesses.

With so many features available on most platforms… rarely do you see every user applying the same controls and features. It’s the freedom to control communication at the single user level that makes VoIP a great business solution. Additionally, the marriage of Business VoIp technology and Unified Communications features opens up a world of unlimited possibilities and applications for today’s business communications.