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Hosted VoIP Not Fully Understood Among Average Users

January 13, 2016

By Michelle Amodio - Virtual PBX Contributor

For many businesses of all sizes, hosted VoIP is a sound choice. In a hosted model, the business only needs to make a nominal investment in telephone sets that are compatible with VoIP, and does not have to worry about operating, maintaining or upgrading their network to support VoIP. While all this is well and good, many customers who use a hosted model, whether it’s a virtual PBX or other cloud-ready solutions, simply don’t understand the scope of what it does.


According to Smart Data Collective, on average, about 72 percent of users don’t understand what hosted VoIP is. Of course, there is no shame in not knowing, but understanding what hosted models can do for your business communications systems can save you a lot of hassle and yes, even money.

Let’s look at a hosted PBX, or virtual PBX. PBX stands for “private branch exchange,” and it is responsible for switching calls between users on local lines while allowing all users to share a certain number of external phone lines. The main purpose of a PBX is to save the cost of requiring a line for each user to the telephone company's central office.

In a hosted or cloud model, there is a nominal investment in telephone sets that are compatible with VoIP, but there are no operating, maintenance or upgrading costs to worry about. Virtual PBX allows businesses added growth flexibility, regardless of size. In the virtual sense, a PBX brings with it cost savings as well as increased productivity.

A virtual PBX is a good choice when a company or organization can’t be bothered with complicated phone systems. There is no longer any need to worry about scalability and upgrades due to capacity requirements. Managing line cards, trunk cards or space in your capacity is not required. Hosted PBX providers handle capacity, performance and configuration of the total VoIP system.

Hosted VoIP is very flexible for supporting branch offices, remote workers, and new sites as the business expands. All that's needed is to add handsets as you go when setting up a new office or adding more locations to your network. Regardless of how busy your phone lines get, hosted VoIP always works. Customers and employees will always be able to get dial tone, and they'll never get a busy signal, even during peak periods.

If you’re among the many who don’t understand what a hosted VoIP or virtual PBX system does, then hopefully this sheds some light on the gray area that is hosted communications.

With hosted VoIP, businesses harness the best of both worlds by being a cost effective way to get PBX-caliber features without the risk or challenges of managing their network.




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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