VoIP For small Businesses

For small businesses, this results in the chance to save a lot of money on phone calls. National and local calls for example, can often cost as little as £0.04 using VoIP.

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) may have a complex name, but the technology is not hard to understand. Simply put, VoIP takes phone calls over the internet instead of using conventional phone networks. Calls between VoIP users never touch the phone network and can therefore be FREE because they never get near telephone companies’ billing systems.

Calls that start or finish on VoIP are often cheap because they only touch the conventional phone networks when they ‘pop out’. Because those calls spend less time on the phone network, phone companies charge less for them.

For small businesses, this results in the chance to save a lot of money on phone calls. National and local calls for example, can often cost as little as £0.04 using VoIP. Long distance international calls can often fall below £0.04 a minute. Line rental charges often plummet, thanks to the fact that many VoIP lines can co-exist on a single internet connection.

Those savings have captured small businesses collective imagination to the extent that even established telephony players like Demon and BT offer VoIP services, while a mosquito squadron of smaller players are also chasing the VoIP pound. One of the reasons they are attractive is that VoIP can comfortably co-exist with the PABXs* and other telephony equipment small businesses own, so the move to VoIP does not have to come at the expense of features like voice mail or transferring calls.

New players however, are now taking matters a step further by offering to host all the necessary equipment to operate a VoIP service and thereby relieving small business from the need to acquire and maintain a PABX at all.

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*PABX = Private Automatic Branch eXchange - this telephone network is commonly by businesses that use call centres or call routing within the office. PABX allows a single access number to offer multiple lines to outside callers while providing a range of external lines to internal callers or staff.