So you’ve heard the term “VoIP” bandied around a lot the past few years, and you’ve used it on a personal level through a service such as Skype (News - Alert) or Apple’s FaceTime. But is it right for your business? How can you use VoIP effectively?
With the telephone networks themselves gearing up to move to an all-IP infrastructure, the case for making the switch to VoIP is not as tenuous as it once might have been. Of course your business should make the move.
The benefits of VoIP are many, including free or low-cost calling, integration with Web resources, being able to carry your business phone in your pocket through a smartphone app, the freedom to work from multiple locations and have your phone service follow you, and a plethora of features.
If you are looking for an inexpensive way to add features such as call screening, forwarding voice messages to e-mail or integrating the phone system with your operating software, VoIP makes sense as it comes standard with such functionality.
While there are a number of benefits to VoIP, it is worth noting that without the Internet backbone to support IP calling, VoIP can be a frustrating proposition at best. If you currently experience sporadic performance issues when going to websites or streaming audio or video, you may end up with a phone system that is an epic fail.
It is therefore important to test the Internet connection of your business before switching to VoIP. You can test your bandwidth and get a sense of how many simultaneous calls it can support at various capacity testing sites.
Also worth keeping in mind is that emergency services such as 911 might not be supported by your VoIP provider, and if the Internet goes down your phone system will fail, too. So make sure that your setup has the ability to automatically reroute your calls to voice mail or another phone should an outage take place.
Further, is possible that you may need to upgrade your routers and/or switches in order to configure the QOS (Quality of Service) settings that allow you to give higher priority to VoIP traffic. This is especially the case if your office has several hardcore Pandora or YouTube (News - Alert) users, since such services can be bandwidth hogs.
When selecting a VoIP provider, make sure to look for the features that your business actually needs, not everything that sounds cool. Make sure that you go with a solution that uses session initiation protocol (SIP), too, as SIP is becoming the standard and will help you avoid lock-in to a proprietary format.
For many businesses, it makes sense to go with a cloud-based VoIP solution since maintenance is then not an issue and there also is no capital investment. Cloud-based VoIP solutions also scale well, among other benefits. You only pay for what you use.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey