Office telephone system - Is VoIP the Best Option?

As high speed internet becomes cheap, increasing number of businesses and enterprise ditching their old traditional phones and jumping off to VoIP as their office telephone. Significantly affordable than the traditional phone lines the hype over VoIP makes it sound like a magic. It is flexible, cost effective (low call rates) and full featured.

If you’re looking for a hosted service, VoIP is pretty simple. All you need is VoIP ready equipment, and then the service provider will do all the rest. From delivering calls to your phone and software clients your service provider can handle all that. No need for additional on-site hardware besides your phones, you just need a little space for the small box (enclosure). Though VoIP is as perfect as it sounds, there are certain things you need to consider before making VoIP your official office telephone system.

Maintaining a self-hosted onsite VoIP system requires a private branch exchange IP (IP based) like PBX phone system for example. Used by many offices, this VoIP friendly system route your calls to the appropriate phones on your network and to PSTN gateway. PSTN gateway converts analog signals to digital. You can ask your provider on how to encrypt your VoIP for a more secure phone usage. This type of office telephone just need a little tweaking for more advanced options which requires accessing your service provider's online account interface.

Using VoIP could cost your company next to nothing especially if you already have an infrastructure in place. The more concurrent users you have, the more bandwidth you need. If you work from home or if you only have few employees, you won’t have to worry much. VoIP is one good office telephone. Your capacity to call simultaneously normally lies on your service provider.

VoIP consumes at approximately 64kb of data every second you talk. You can actually use chat on VoIP without having to worry about hitting your bandwidth caps, but make sure to keep close tabs on your data usage to avoid over spending on exceeding cap.