VOIP for business?
My company is looking at a voip system, particularly the NEC aspire system. I understand what that means inside the building. How do calls route outside the building? Do we still need the 14 analog phone lines we have now? Most of our customers have normal phones. What happens when we call them? Do they go thru a provider or our phone company?
This system is a NEC Aspire system. The vendor said because we have a regular phone infrastructure in place, we would use the 1 paired wire and non-ip phones for now although the phones
could be turned into IP phones with a add-on. We would still have all the
features the phone system has but wouldnt have to worry about our local
network traffice for now. They mentioned a prime line to replace our phone lines. Our vendor said that we could just buy some IP phones for our other locations, plug them in, and make free calls to them. I dont know if that would go thru the
prime line or our internet connection. I told him that our current internet
connection is likely not good for VOIP and he said we could throw in a cable
modem with a minimum connection for these calls to our other locations. I
am not sure how that would all work though. So it sounded like we would
have 2 connections to the net but i dont know how our internal network would be affected by that.
Tags
Tags: Analog Phone Lines, Local Network, Nec
I’ve pursued this course for the small business I’m at as well, and I think I can help add some incite.
VOIP depends on a broadband connection, not your standard phone line. That’s not to say that it won’t work by going through a phone line (you could use DSL for instance), but you need to run that VOIP through your internet server for it to be effective. Once it goes out into the external internet, it will be routed through normal phone lines to reach whomever you are trying to contact. In this way, those you are contacting do not need anything more than a normal phone and a phone line.
As for a provider, you usually have to subscribe to a VOIP service to make external calls. You might check into Vonage to start since they are one of the premier VOIP service providers out there. Some standard phone companies are starting to buy into the VOIP idea, but this is happening slowly, and you are more likely to find someone through an independant company like Vonage.
Keep in mind that you’re dealing with two different things. Your company owns a phone system, and your phone company owns a phone system.
Your phone system is probably a small one, probably in just one building. It can be used to handle calls within your business, and should have a place to plug in a connection to your phone company’s system. You could have an old fashioned analog phone system, you could put in a more modern one. Your phone company doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, what kind of a phone system you have inside, as long as you keep paying the bill. Your employees should only notice that the phones have new features, and that your IT people don’t have to spend nearly as much time fiddling with it. As long as you’re not skimping on quality when you choose a system, and hire someone to install it, it’ll work very well, whether it’s old fashioned or VOIP.
Your phone company is probably an old fashioned one. Odds are good that they were part of AT&T at one point, and still have a lot of the same wires as they used to. They have a huge network, nationwide or worldwide, and have connections to all the other phone companies out there. You pay a monthly phone bill, so they’ll handle all the wires going to everywhere else in the world. You probably also buy an internet connection from them. They’re reliable, they’re good for local calls, and you know that the voice quality will be perfect on local phone calls, and good on long distance. They’re also the phone line you want to use to call 911.
You might decide to get a phone company which runs over your internet connection, and uses VOIP, such as Vonage. Phone companies which use VOIP tend to be fairly cheap, and a great deal for long distance and international calls. If you are planning to go VOIP, I’d suggest always paying for at least one Plain Old Telephone Line. You should also keep in mind that you’re running the VOIP on your internet connection. If your internet connection is unreliable, or doesn’t have enough bandwidth, you’ll have problems. Your router should support Quality of Service, and you need an internet connection which is dependably fast, like a T1.
Voice quality explanation:
When you’re making a local call on a plain old telephone line, the phone company doesn’t bother to try to compact your phone call into a smaller signal, which is why they always sound good. You get a whole phone line just handling the sound of your voice. When you call long distance, or overseas, it may not sound quite as good. This is because they need to cram the signals from a lot of phone calls into a limited connection. VOIP companies also compact your call a little bit, they change it from analog to digital, and try to make it a nice small digital signal, so they can handle it efficiently. When the phone company does their job well, you won’t notice the difference. You might say it sounds a little bit flat.
So, you can have an old fashioned or modern phone system, I’d go with the modern one, and be sure to do it right. You’ll still need a phone company. You can also have an old fashioned or modern phone company, but I wouldn’t ditch the plain old telephone company entirely.
By the way, I tend to talk about this in a fairly non-technical way, feel free to post another question if you’re interested in technical details.
Your VoIP phone system (PBX) is going to take care of routing calls between your VoIP extensions and analog (POTS) lines. Which actually brings an additional question: are you buying the VoIP phone system for any benefit that VoIP provides or you are just trying to be fashionable? I am sure that you are already aware of the fact that your phones are now going to have to use the same wiring as data and they are going to have to be powered via PoE switches (do you have them?) or local power supplies that you are going to have to have power sockets for. Also, your data network is going to have to be accessed and VLANs implemented as well as QoS. For many customers just the wiring alone may become a VoIP show-stopper. So, be extra careful. I always advise my potential customers to use the benefit of having existing wiring and install digital extensions on the inside and use VoIP trunks for any outside connections like telecommuters and branch offices. This, of course, assumes that the phone system that’s being installed (Avaya IP Office in our case) is capable of handling both IP and digital phones and has all the modern features that customers came to appreciate, including computer integration. Many customers think that you have to have a VoIP system to use benefits of computer integration which is not true.
So, make sure you are buying VoIP phone system for the right reason and yes, your calls are still going to be handled by your phone company, not the PBX vendor unless this is the same organization.
The resource below has plenty discussions about pros and cons of VoIP phone systems that you might find interesting.