Most discussions about reducing cables and increasing mobility for business teams center on networking and electrical cords. Wi-Fi frees computers from the constraints of network switches and routers, for example.

But have you considered how constraining traditional business phone systems are? While many households have moved on from landlines and instead opted for the convenience (and cost savings) of mobile phones, many businesses—especially small ones—are stuck with clunky, costly voice communication systems.

Ditching dedicated phones lines completely isn’t an option for most businesses. But using Voice over IP (VoIP) to reap the benefits of modern telephony certainly is possible.

VoIP can offer powerful productivity, mobility and cost-saving advantages for business phone systems. 

With VoIP, you get a modern phone system with sophisticated features once affordable only to enterprises, plus the flexibility to assign phone extensions to each person on the team without paying for additional lines.

And, wireless IP handsets let you introduce a new level of mobility, freeing limited IT resources from having to spend time running cables.

Making the switch to VoIP is a no-brainer for most businesses, but there are some important decisions to make when choosing a solution. For example, some locations are served best by hardware-based systems, while others are better matched by a cloud service.

Hardware-based VoIP systems typically connect directly to the company’s network router or switch. The VoIP switch controls voice communication transactions like call routing from a single phone number, based on how it’s configured. (The business only needs to pay for one number, but functionally obtains multiple phones.)

Other questions a business needs to ask itself when choosing a VoIP system include:

How many extensions do we need? (Some systems scale more cost-effectively than others.)

Do we need a new main phone number, or can we port our existing one? (Some providers assign new numbers.)

What kind of phones do we need? (Typically, the base station needs to connect to the network by Ethernet, but phones can be wireless.)

How important is it to avoid all wired network connections? (Cloud-based services can eliminate the need for any on-site setup.)

What changes, if any, do we need to make to our existing network? (A second Wi-Fi network may be needed to avoid wireless interference.)

There is no shortage of VoIP solutions available for small businesses. Choosing the right one is largely a matter of considering its impact on your network bandwidth and how that relates to call quality.