VOIP is an acronym for Voice Over Internet Protocol, or in more common terms phone service over the Internet.
If you have a reasonable quality Internet connection you can get phone service delivered through your Internet connection instead of from your local phone company.
How Does VoIP Work?
Generally, things are pretty simple if you’re looking for a hosted service. Many of the top VoIP providers handle all the heavy lifting offsite, delivering calls to your phones and software clients without much hassle, especially if you use phones that are plug-and-play certified for the service in question. The majority require no additional on-site hardware aside from those phones; at most, you might need to find a space for a small box of hardware somewhere on-site.
In contrast, maintaining a self-hosted, on-site VoIP system requires a bit more work. You need an IP-based private branch exchange—a VoIP-friendly version of the PBX phone systems that many offices use—to route your calls to the appropriate phones on your network, as well as a device called a PSTN gateway. The PSTN gateway sits between the IP-PBX software and the analog signals of the public switched telephone network, converting calls to and from digital signals as necessary.
No matter which option you choose, typically you can handle the basic settings for your phone lines or extensions over the phone, while tweaking more advanced options requires diving into your provider’s online account interface.
What Do You Need to Implement VoIP?
Depending on the size of your company and the infrastructure you already have in place, jumping on the VoIP bandwagon could cost your company next to nothing, or it could entail significant up-front costs.
Even home broadband connections can handle several VoIP calls simultaneously, though you’ll need to be sure to leave bandwidth available for other applications as well.
VoIP requires a broadband connection—and the more simultaneous users you have, the more bandwidth you’ll need. If you work alone out of a home office, or if you have only a few employees, you won’t have much to worry about; for example, on my setup, running RingCentral’s Connection Capacity utility shows that my 15-mbps home Comcast connection could handle 11 calls simultaneously even if I had Netflix, Spotify, and an instant-messaging client running on the network at the same time.
Make sure that your internal network—including your routers and switches—can handle the load, too. Most providers suggest using a router with configurable Quality of Service settings and assigning VoIP traffic high priority to maximize quality.
If your Internet service provider has a bandwidth cap in place, you should take that into consideration as well. Most VoIP service providers use the high-quality G.711 codec for VoIP communications, which consumes 64kb of data every second you talk. In reality, even a large number of people should be able to chat it up on VoIP without having to worry about hitting bandwidth caps, but you’ll want to keep close tabs on your data usage to avoid exceeding that cap.
What makes VoIP so attractive for businesses?
The low cost of VoIP is its biggest attraction. Business VoIP services are significantly less expensive than traditional phone services. You have much less hardware to buy or lease; in fact, many hosted services require no new hardware investment at all. If you do need hardware, it’s typically based on standardized technologies such as SIP, as opposed to proprietary products that tie you to a particular service provider. Monthly subscription fees are lower, as well.
VoIP is cheaper than a traditional landline if you have staff in far-flung locations. Since in-network calls travel exclusively over data networks and don’t need to hit the public phone lines, most VoIP providers let you make calls to your coworkers for free, even if you’re in New York and they’re in San Francisco. Don’t worry, do-it-yourselfers: IP-PBX servers can handle remote employees as well.
Many hosted VoIP providers offer mobile apps that let you make and receive calls from the road using your data connection. Usually you can adjust the apps to ring simultaneously with your office phone or to act as a stand-alone extension.
