Cell phones and the cloud have dramatically changed the nature of business and continue to do so, and one way that it has changed the nature of work is through the increasing mobility of workers.
The mobile workforce is expected to grow to 1.3 billion by next year, according to Epik Networks (News - Alert), and this trend has gotten workers out of their cubicles and into home offices, airports, coffee shops and just about anywhere else that there is a cellular data connection.
Yet, not all countries are equally supportive of the trend. Canada, for instance, has some of the highest prices and worst service when it comes to cellular connections in the industrialized world, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
This hampers Canadian business, which is one reason that an increasing number of Canadian businesses are adopting VoIP and hosted telephone systems as an alternative.
Hosted VoIP provides mobile applications that are a sustainable alternative to high-cost carrier offerings. They transform smartphones and tablets into portable office networks, and deliver a number of benefits.
They work by sending voice calls through the Internet instead of carrier networks, easing cost. Calls can be made through a 3G or Wi-Fi connection, eliminating mobile costs entirely in some cases.
By using a hosted VoIP solution such as that offered by BroadConnect, one of the most popular hosted VoIP providers in Canada, businesses can make free in-network long distance, eliminate roaming charges, reduce carrier minute use, link all mobile employees without added expense, and use softphone apps on smartphones and tablets to enable a truly mobile office.
This last point is worth emphasizing.
While many assume cell phones enable mobile workers, the truth is that by default they only partially enable them. That’s because while calls can be made outside of the office, there’s still the issues of the office phone not being available, times when cell phone signal coverage is not present, and things such as integrated address books and PBX (News - Alert) systems.
A cell phone enables mobile calling, but that’s not actually a fully mobile office.
With a hosted telephone system, however, businesses can take their office network and apply it to workers no matter where they are located. The cell phone just becomes one device that can access the business phone network. This has real productivity and mobility gains above and beyond just using a cell phone.
So there are a number of reasons why businesses such as those in Canada are looking at hosted phone systems. For Canadian businesses it can help solve the problem of cellular service and pricing, but for businesses in general it also better enables the mobility trend that is now in full swing among workers.
Edited by Alisen Downey