Most Voice over IP solutions seem to be aimed at either home users looking for free or cheap calls to friends and family, or big companies with a lot more money to spend. However, the technologies involved at these extremes are equally applicable to small businesses and there are a growing number of VoIP products that can help these companies not only save money on phone bills, but also work and look a lot smarter.
Small-business benefits
As with home and big business users, the most obvious benefit of VoIP to smaller companies will be lower phone bills. Calls to and from other VoIP users, such as a remote office or home worker, can be made for free or almost nothing and, depending on how you go about it, the cost of calls to PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) numbers is also reduced.
There are, though, other benefits, such as the ability to support multiple simultaneous voice users and a fax machine using just one broadband line. In rental costs alone, that can be a big saving for an organisation with between one and five staff. VoIP also allows small businesses to implement corporate-like telephony services, such as direct dial, voicemail, music on hold and call forwarding, without the need to invest in an expensive PBX (Private Branch Exchange) switchboard.
Less obvious advantages include what’s best described as a virtual office.
Now the regulator ComReg allows service providers to attach real geographic numbers to their VoIP products, allowing small businesses to create virtual offices all over Ireland and abroad. These can be directed to any location with Internet access, be it a home office, customer premises or a wireless hotspot. Just add a website and you’ve a professional presence that can, in reality, be almost anywhere.
Companies with their own switchboard can also use VoIP to extend the reach of such systems. For example, home workers can be connected to the PBX via their broadband or ISDN Internet connection, enabling them to make and receive calls as though in the main office. Again, this gives a very professional appearance while at the same time allowing for flexible distributed working without the burden of long- distance call charges.
Mobile workers can, similarly, be ‘in the office’ while out and about, using VoIP. And you can get all this without the expense of your own PBX hardware, through the virtual switchboards offered by some service providers. There are limitations and practical considerations to bear in mind with all VoIP solutions, and we’ll look at these in more detail below.
Service solutions
There are several ways for a small business to get started with VoIP but, initially at least, the easiest and quickest is to sign up with one of the many IP telephony or broadband phone services appearing on the Web. Some are free, but where there’s a charge it’s mostly the connection to the PSTN that you’re paying for and for PC users no special hardware – beyond a soundcard and a headset – is usually needed, although the better the phone, the better the clarity during a call.
In most cases custom IP phones can be used if preferred – they simply plug into the local data network or USB port. Or, if you want to use an ordinary phone to make and receive VoIP calls, these too can be accommodated through a simple adapter.
For the sole trader or small partnership, consumer products, such as Skype (www.skype.com), which are free to set up, would be a good way of starting with VoIP, although if you look around, several of the service providers offer initial free minutes, so that you can try before you buy.
Skype is only free when calling other registered users and requires a PC or PDA to host the softphone. Although users can now make calls to the PSTN via the chargeable Skypeout service, there are no facilities yet to receive calls. Still, if you just want to talk to a remote office or reduce your mobile bills, a service such as Skype could be the answer.
Alternatively there are several chargeable services which allow users to make and receive calls via the PSTN and use IP and analogue handsets, such as Blueface.ie. However, most of these are priced to appeal to home users making calls at evenings and weekends and, as such, may not fit the needs of business users making most of their calls on weekdays. Where more than a couple of users are concerned you can get better savings and more functionality from the increasing number of VoIP services tailored to the needs of small businesses and their range and sophistication is growing all the time.
Specifically small business
What you get here is likely to vary from one provider to another. In some cases the business service simply adds support for multiple subscribers along with, in some cases, a choice of geographic and non- geographic dial-in numbers. Some providers, however, go further and offer full virtual switchboard facilities along with service guarantees to enable small companies to almost do away with the need for traditional PSTN lines.
Good examples of fully featured virtual PBX service providers are Herbst and CT3 Europe.com. Those solutions allow small businesses to link multiple sites via a web-managed virtual switchboard. Calls between sites are free with no special hardware required other than a broadband Internet connection. IP phones can be leased as part of some of these services and, along with direct dial, you can add voicemail and interactive voice response (‘Press 1 for sales enquiries’) options, together with advanced CTI (Computer Telephone Integration) facilities to, for example, bring up customer details automatically when calls are received.
Another benefit with all service-based solutions is that they are easy to grow should the need arise. However, some care is still needed when going down the service route and it’s important to realise that you’re putting all your communication eggs in one basket. If your broadband connection were to fail you would lose not just e-mail and web access, but the phone system too. That means you need to make sure you have more than one ADSL line or an independent backup connection to the PSTN.
You may also need to add extra broadband lines to maintain quality as call volumes rise, and upgrade your local network and routers. It’s worth noting that, should an ADSL link become a bottleneck, there’s little point simply upgrading to a faster service as the uplink bandwidth (from you to the ISP) stays the same with ADSL (256Kbits/sec) no matter what the downlink speed. SDSL (Symmetric DSL) solves this, but as yet isn’t universally available and is a lot more costly.
Do it yourself
The number of small-business VoIP service providers and service options is growing all the time, but there are alternatives to the service-based approach. Indeed there are several other ways of deploying and using VoIP technology directly, such as broadband routers with a VoIP gateway built in.
A number of companies are now selling these products, including D- Link (www.dlink.com) and Draytek (www.draytek.co.uk). Draytek’s Vigor 2600V, for example, incorporates not just a standard ADSL router, firewall and VPN server, but also has two ports into which ordinary telephone handsets can be plugged. VoIP calls can then be made to handsets plugged into a similar router at another site, enabling remote offices to communicate with each other over the Internet for free. In addition, with the help of an optional Internet gateway service (Draytel) it’s possible to make and receive PSTN calls.
Costing around EUR*265 ex VAT, this kind of router is worth looking at by small companies with no existing PBX hardware. However, if you already have some kind of switchboard you need a gateway to take the voice output from PBX extensions and convert this into a VoIP data stream. Products include Bosanova gateway from Boscom (www.boscom.com), Quintum’s Tenor AS200/400 (www.quintum.com) and a number of products from Micronet (www.micronet.tw.com).
Prices here start at around EUR*200 ex VAT, but can be a lot higher depending on the number of extensions supported and the amount of additional functionality, such as an integrated router and PSTN backup facilities. However, in each case what you get is a device that can map one or more PBX extensions to remote VoIP phones. Those phones can then be used as though they were local extensions to both send and receive calls. Outgoing calls are charged at the same rate as from a local extension even though the user is remote.
On the downside there’s usually little or no support available to local extension users for any of the extra features. Calls can be made and received, but to get call forwarding, voicemail and other options, you’ll need a custom IP gateway from the PBX vendor, and they tend to be more expensive.
Everything VoIP
Finally, one last way of deploying VoIP is to install a custom IP- based PBX complete with an in-house gateway to connect VoIP users to the public network. Here there’s no need for a separate phone system as calls between extensions are carried over the network, including VPN tunnels to remote offices and mobile workers. The PSTN connectivity is, typically, achieved via one or more ISDN lines connected to the central PBX, although the PBX can also be linked by VoIP to public PSTN gateway services.
There are lots of well-established IP PBX solutions from companies such as 3Com, Alcatel, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and others. Most, though, require a significant up-front investment, and you still have to rent your own PSTN lines, putting such products beyond the reach of most small companies.
That said, there are more affordable software-based solutions to suit the larger small business (typically, 15-plus users) which can be hosted on industry-standard PC hardware.
Such as Swyxware (www.swyx.com), for example, which runs on Windows, and Asterisk (www.asterisk.org), an open-source PBX for use with Linux. However, the software-based products still need to be installed, configured and maintained and companies thinking of going down this route should consider these and other cost implications very carefully.
Indeed, if you’re thinking of using VoIP in your business, a lot of careful research is required to make sure you get the best out of the technology and the savings it can, when properly implemented, deliver.
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