Small Business

Overview

Telephone Systems have traditionally come from big monopoly phone companies, and/or licensed PBX technologies of various flavors. They were horribly expensive, anything but flexible, and impossible to learn. Today there's some big changes happening in the Telephony world, and guess who's driving the progress? The Internet.

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is revolutionized telecommunications. Instead of expensive T1 lines and/or ancient telephone lines - calls are now being shipped over high speed internet connections. VoIP has dropped the bottom out of the monopolies' artificially high buy in price, but the best part is the features gained when users switch off the PSTN and start utilizing their computers, networks, and high speed connections.

What's New

Someone asked me the other day, "What's wrong with just using a regular phone," - nothing of course, but it's the same old adage - 'nothing ventured, nothing gained'. There's nothing wrong with typewriters either - if all you want to do is type a letter. Just as computers have jazzed up the word processing field, VoIP is sprucing up what you can do with your phones.

Asterisk is an open source phone system platform that a lot of companies are now utilizing to create highly advanced phone systems. You can transfer calls, conference, add multiple voicemail boxes, create menus, create queues, and more for a fraction of the cost of hardware based systems. Asterisk is pretty raw by itself, and extremely complicated, so using it stand alone is a daunting proposition. Fortunately there are many companies throughout the nation that have developed cleaned up, ready-for-use versions that are easy to use and don't break the bank.

There's a lot more to be excited about than just inexpensively recreating the features of yesteryear. Your phones will now speak your computers language. What does that mean to you? Your phones can be integrated with your databases, tickets systems, point of sale systems, and more. Gone are the days of spending thousands of dollars on a phone system and thousands of dollars on a database system that don't talk to each other. With VoIP your phones and computers will flirt and fall in love - and eventually - become one.

Where Do I Find VoIP Systems

Finding a reliable VoIP phone system provider is definitely the crux of the implementation process. Many providers offer "unlimited long distance" but are really offering themselves "limited futures". Beware of anything that sounds to good to be true - a lot of VoIP providers go belly up - the good ones match their costs to the prices. Long distance is the one to watch for, if it doesn't seem like they could make money at your rate - they won't.

Voice quality is another issue, if your provider is in New York and you're in LA - expect bad voice quality. You may find the quality of national provider sufficient, it's usually about as good as a cell phone, but most users will notice the bad quality and want something better. The thing to look for is a local provider, someone that has invested in the local telephone switch and cares deeply about "Quality of Service" (QoS) as it is called in the industry. A good provider will recommend their preferred internet connection, including a particular modem, some connections work better than others (cable connections can be quite unreliable) and hardware matters too.

VoIP based systems are easy to design in a way that gives the user control of the features. Some providers like to withhold features from users - which actually isn't such a bad thing in many cases - but make sure you make your provider aware of the features you'd like. No matter how space age something you'd like might seem, chances are a good VoIP provider can make it happen for you. If they can't offer you the basic features you want - look elsewhere. VoIP systems are complicated and if your provider can't figure out the basics, chances are the whole system is riddled with poorly written patches and workarounds.

This is a newer technology and as such many companies are just starting to get customers, don't expect a long track record of success. You're going to be paying about a tenth of the cost of what the guys with track records would charge, so have a little faith. Why isn't everyone doing this? Because the big guys have worked very hard to lock their customers into long contracts, and because it's not easy to compete with companies that spend millions of dollars lobbying to stifle the competition.

Conclusion

Internet based phone systems are the future. The proof? All the big phone companies already send their calls over the internet between their major hubs to save money - they just don't let on that that's what they're doing or pass the savings on to their customers. Internet Technology is not strong enough yet to support large national VoIP providers at a level that is consistent enough for most businesses. Look for the local geniuses hiding behind their workstations. Evaluate your provider closely, but also have faith and take the plunge - because once you find the right VoIP Phone System your life will get a lot easier, your business will do better, and you'll be able to tell your buddies "we had a system like that way before the whole world had one."