Phone Systems For Small Business

Small businesses require flexible, feature-rich telephone services.

In the past, this was a costly part of setting up a small business. Usually you would either have to spend thousands of dollars on a complex, proprietary PBX, or you would have to make do with a basic service from the phone company that might not cost as much, but also wouldn’t provide the features you needed.

Today, with cloud-based PBX services, you can get inexpensive access to big phone system features, for less than a basic phone line used to cost in the past. Standards-compliant telephone sets mean you don’t have to lock in to a single vendor for 10 years, but instead can take advantage of competition in the industry, and ensure your provider is giving you exactly what you need, at a price you can afford.

You can still get a dedicated phone system for your business (this can be a great option if you have access to strong technical skills), and these days such systems are also more advanced and cost-effective than the old proprietary systems of decades past.

Either way; cloud-based (hosted) or onsite (PBX), small businesses have never had more options for getting powerful business telecom capabilities at manageable prices.

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What Is VoIP: The Cultural Shift

Voice over IP is a significant technology, however it’s not because it represents any sort of technical advance over traditional voice, but rather because it is disruptive, and changes the game.

In the past, telecom technology was a tightly-controlled, old-boys club, monopolized by large companies able to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars required to be able to play.

What VoIP did was bring telecom into a new arena, the Internet, where open standards and commoditized hardware ruled. Suddenly, the technology became something that anyone could learn about. Coupled with this, the rise of the open-source PBX meant that it was now possible to build a standards-compliant telephone system using nothing more than a server, a network, and a willingness to learn. We wrote the Asterisk bookin part because we wanted to provide a technical guide to those interested in this telephony revolution.

VoIP has changed the world of telecom. It has lowered costs, increased functionality, standardized complex protocols, and is steadily bridging the gap between the human voice and the computer.

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What Is VoIP?: The Basics

Remember the old phone network? You made a call, owned that connection for as long as you wanted it.

Then this thing called VoIP came along. Promises of free phone calls, and all sorts of enhanced features, and all you needed was a PhD in Network Design to make it work (or maybe not work).

What is VoIP? It stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. So, it just means sending voice across a network that uses the Internet Protocol (the most famous of which is the internet itself), rather than across an old-school telephone circuit.

VoIP traffic has to share the connection between you and the person you are calling with all the other traffic on the network. Videos, pictures, emails, web page traffic; it’s all happening on the same network. If the network is working well, everything gets to where it’s going and all is well.

Unfortunately, if something doesn’t get where it’s going, the human ear can’t handle that. If even part of a word is lost, it becomes almost impossible to carry on a conversation. Computers don’t care; they’ll just retransmit. Humans are more fussy. We don’t like having to ask somebody to repeat what they said.

So, yes, VoIP is a bit more complex. Instead of a dedicated connection across the circuit-switched telecom network, there is a stream of tiny little packages, each one containing just a small part of the conversation, and they all have to get from one end to the other, in the correct order, with none of them lost, and with minimal delay getting there.

You can think of VoIP in a manner similar to how a courier works. You have several parts which the factory (your voice) needs send somewhere to be assembled (the phone of the person you’re talking to). Each part is sent as soon as it is built, so the sending starts before all the parts are complete. You address a package, and it is picked up, placed on a truck, taken to the sorting facility, put in a crate, on an airplane, and then carried with all sorts of other traffic to somewhere near the destination, where it is taken off the plane, out of the crate, and placed on a truck where it is eventually delivered. At the other end, each packet is opened, and the part inside is added to whatever is being made from all the parts. When all the parts have arrived, you have a finished product!

When it works, it’s invisible to us. When it doesn’t work, it drives us nuts.

Ten years ago, it mostly didn’t work very well. Today? It works very well indeed. Most network equipment is now aware of the unique needs of voice traffic, and excellent quality VoIP is normal in any well-designed network.

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