Phone System Technology
Whether you're starting a new business or your business has outgrown its current phone system, sooner or later, you'll need to make the difficult decision about which phone system to invest in.
You have probably heard about Voice Over IP (VOIP) technology and I'm sure you have a few questions, lets go over what the technology has to offer.
First there are many stages of VOIP. Let's start from the phone company side. Traditionally, phone companies have provided what's called a PRI connection as the interface between the phone company and your phone system. If you have a small number of phones lines you might use just analog lines. VOIP has revolutionalized the way you connect to the phone company.
You do have a choice. Instead of using a PRI interface along with an expensive PRI adapter in your phone system or an analog adapter, you can use SIPConnect provided by companies like Cbeyond. SIPConnect lets you connect to the phone company via a standard network cable.
So now you can have all 10 or 250 numbers with a simple network connection, without requiring expensive PRI setup, it's a simple clean way to connect to the phone company. Next stage of VOIP is the connection of the phones to the phone system using standard network cable.
This is a huge cost saving if your office is not already wired for phone lines as you can simply use your network wiring for phones as well. The phones connect to your network jack in the wall and the computers connect to the phones. These not only saves additional cost of cabling, but also makes your layout much simpler and easy to troubleshoot/maintain. Remember, don't get locked in to non standard technologies, where ever possible insist on SIP protocol as means of communication over the network. SIP is an open standards protocol that most VOIP phone systems use and is by far the most proven protocol for voice. Using SIP will future proof your investment and allow you to enhance/scale your voice communications as needed.
Another benefit of having VOIP phones is, if a user moves to another office, you don't have to pay the phone system provider to reconfigure that extension. The user simply takes their phone with them, plugs it into the network jack at the new office and they have all their settings follow them. Taking the same concept a step further, if a user wants to work from the house or a hotel room, they simply plug their phone into a network jack at the remote location and their extension is now at the remote location, of course you have to have internet access at the remote site.
If you have people in the field like sales people, a VOIP system makes life easier for them too. Instead of lugging their phone with them, sales people can simply use a softphone which is simply software installed on their laptop and now they have their phone extension on their laptop and they can make and receive calls from the field. Not only can sales people now make and receive calls, but when someone calls their extension from the office, it rings on their laptop and of course all calls are toll free.
In addition, since a VOIP phone system is simply a computer, most systems will give your users presence notification so users will always know if another user is available in their office and send instant messages back and forth instead of having to use the intercom (very handy to send an urgent IM when the other person is in a meeting).
Now if you have branch offices, you can connect the VOIP phone systems together between offices. This makes voice communications seamless across the entire enterprise enabling users to simply dial an extension for the user in any branch office or at a remote location.
I don't want to make this article too long, but this is just a short summary of some of the features of VOIP phone systems like ones from Fonality. Fonality systems are open standards based making it a good investment. Fonality recently got investment from Intel Capital and has sold systems in 37 countries. Fonality phone systems have made over 75,000,000 calls. Applications like simple integration with Outlook, CRM software and an easy to use Heads Up Display on your computer make Fonality PBXtra an easy choice.
Nadeem Azhar 05/21/2007
2006 Copyright PC.Solutions.Net Business process automation, information technology consulting, IT Outsourcing, HP partner, IBM partner, Microsoft partner, Secure Computing partner, GFI partner, Neverfail partner, Fonality Partner
Fonality PBXtra Standard PCSN#PBXS $4999.00 (Installed!) Fonality's award winning PBXtra Standard Edition with 10 Aastra 9133i phones and annual support agreement all installed and configured for SIPConnect (phone service not included). Click here to view comparison with other major phone system providers. Unlimited extensions |
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