There is no question that VoIP is taking over PSTN to become the de facto choice for communications systems. I personally haven’t had a landline in years and even though cell signal isn’t that great in my rural area, I have a fast internet connection and am able to use my mobile phone over WiFi (News - Alert). Businesses, and especially small companies and those with remote or home offices, are certainly becoming savvy to all the benefits of VoIP. The question then becomes, what is the quickest and best way to implement it?
For companies that have legacy PSTN equipment already in place, the VoIP gateway is the obvious solution. Gateways allow companies to experience all the features, flexibility and efficiencies of VoIP using their existing phones, fax machines and even PBXs. That means they can make a slow migration to VoIP and digital communications without a giant capital expenditure, as the gateway will perform all the heavy lifting of converting analog calls to IP.
This enables businesses to steadily add new equipment like IP PBXs or hosted or cloud-based PBXs or SIP trunks while still maintaining some older, legacy equipment. VoIP gateways also perform least cost routing, which is a massive benefit for small businesses looking for the cheapest way to connect calls. Gateways are also useful for backup and disaster recovery, enabling a PSTN connection as a fallback in the event of an outage.
Of course, VoIP gateways aren’t only suitable for smaller offices and can be greatly beneficial for larger enterprises attempting to accomplish a slow and steady migration to VoIP. They make a great fit for distributed campuses as well, and with more businesses migrating to SD-WAN for their networking needs, a gateway can take advantage of those fast connection speeds to route calls.
Making a wholesale switch from the PSTN and legacy communications hardware to VoIP just isn’t economically feasible or practical for most companies. VoIP gateways bridge the gap and enable a slow and steady migration, an essential feature as the digital age transforms the entire business landscape.
Edited by Maurice Nagle