About 5 weeks ago I was looking through our accounting and realized that I had double paid an Embarq phone bill at around $305.00. I have been used to seeing a phone bill for over $300.00 for quite a while but was puzzled when I looked closer and realized the values in Quickbooks were not exactly the same. Curious, and in these current economic times not one to sit around and waste money, I quickly went to the physical bill file and pulled out two Embarq phone bills. It turned out that I had run up a bill for about $305.00 in long distance fees while dealing with a particularly busy month. I was to say the least displeased that my little 5 person office managed to score a $610.00 phone bill.

It was that realization that led me to two conclusions: 1)It’s great that we are growing during these tough economic times but growth doesn’t do me any good if the money just goes right back out the door, and 2) There just has to be a better way to deal with these long distance bills. We have website clients in various states across the southeast and one of the things that makes us special is that our staff never hesitates to pick up the phone and deliver good customer service.

A few years back a company that I was working with implemented a system called Voice over IP… basically telephones through the internet. The setup was expensive but allowed for some very advanced features and big savings on the phone bill.

The problem with this system as we all soon learned was constant echoing, bad call quality, dropped calls, and overall instability.

Since it had been several years since this trial and error I decided that I must not be the only person in this situation and decided to google the subject and do some learning.

As it turns out I was right that technology had changed quite a bit. The old system that I had used had now been moved out of the local users office and into reliable and redundant data centers and the major difference was that Voice over IP was being marketed as a service, rather than a type of server you could buy for thousands and hope to one day get some ROI out of.

What is really neat about this concept is that it does several major important things that really make you look hard at it as not just a good alternative but a realistic advantage:

1)If you are a small business, or a business that just doesn’t want to spend thousands on a pbx system then VoIP is awesome because it uses the hosted services model, essentialy the VoIP server is hosted by the carrier company out on the internet and the only thing you need in your office is phones. There is no expensive phone system to maintain, no service contracts to deal with, and because it is basically all software, it instantly scales to your exact needs and has every feature of even the most expensive pbx.

2)VoIP is the only alternative if you need to link two offices together as one. Because it’s through the internet and the pbx is on the internet, you can have extensions anywhere in the world there is internet and you will still be extension xxx and nobody would ever know the difference.

3)Bundled features = cost savings - everything is bundled in one price, including unlimited long distance and advanced reporting on call performance that standard and intermediate phone systems (think $20,000+) still can’t do.

4)Quicker setup than a regular phone system. Ours took 1.5 hours to setup start to finish including all of the greeting recording and voicemail setup.

5)In this area it would be wonderful if you weren’t out of business every time the power goes off. With hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning storms, and city power all being able to stop your business from answering the phone, it’s good to know that your phones won’t have that problem anymore because they won’t be in your office anymore. Now, when an extension isn’t available, it just forwards to your cell phone, or an unlimited number of other places you specify.

6)More advanced phones for cheaper. Believe it or not, VoIP phones are actually cheaper than regular business phones. This is because most VoIP providers are open to any brand which creates more competition. Additionally, phones are made by standard phone companies like polycom and siemens as well as traditional computer companies like cisco and dlink. As a result, there is more selection at a lower price. Even cooler, integration with Outlook gets developed more and more each day and soon we will be able to run our phones from outlook completely. You can already dial from your outlook contacts.

7)Cost savings… chop 40% off your phone bill in this economy? Heck yeah! I am canceling Embarq completely and going with Comcast business internet which is more than twice the speed and still saving about $100.00 per month. The cost makes it a win / win.

So with a win / win scenario like this we ask the question what are the disadvantages? Surely there must be some down side to it?

The downsides that I have discovered mostly deal with setup with the carrier. For instance, we were assigned phone numbers that had the same three number prefix but still required dialing long distance. No big deal since long distance is now free, but still a concern… temporarily, and here is why.

What about my existing phone number? As I discovered, Embarq doesn’t own your phone number. Put in a request to your new VoIP carrier and they port your phone number to them in about 1-3 weeks. Long distance issue solved.

Another issue that I have rarely come across is when dialing within a phone tree it occasionally does not recognize what number I have pressed if I hit the number very quickly. For the most part this is really a non-issue.

In our system we have not noticed static or echoing at all, however it has been reported that it is still an issue in some places. My thoughts are that it depends on the provider’s endpoint equipment and our provider has not had those issues.

Inability to see if someone is on the phone. This is my biggest gripe of all. There is no way that we have figured out to know if the extension you are about to dial is in use. The caller will just continue to be forwarded along the path or to voicemail if the extension does not pick up. However, this does allow for an extension to choose between calls and put calls on hold individually. Possibly a disadvantage, possibly an advantage.

To Be Continued…