Hosted VoIP

You need Voice to speak the same language as your computers!

Are you in the market for a new on-premise VoIP phone system for your company but you are leery about investing a large sum of money into a technology that is changing at such a rapid pace? Are you unsure what your phone system needs will be in the next 3-5 years? Are you overwhelmed with the responsibility and time it is taking you to keep your current phone system working at all sites, 24/7? If so, you are not alone. For these reasons, Hosted Voice over Internet Protocol (“Hosted VoIP”) is one of the fastest growing technologies in the telecom industry.

With a hosted VoIP phone system, your service provider delivers phones (“handsets”), to your office, which use a data connection to link back to the phone system server, located with your service provider, off-site. The provider owns and manages everything. You are charged per user and can typically scale your users up and down, as business needs arise. You can also turn features on and off, as needed.

How does it work?

With Hosted VoIP, you are technically a private guest, using your service provider’s gigantic VoIP phone system/server, which is sitting inside their secure data center. Your phones/handsets are programmed with an IP address, which allows them to find/connect to the provider’s VoIP server through either a public Internet connection or a private data circuit linking your site to the data center. The type of VoIP server the service provider uses will dictate the make and model of the IP handsets you can use in your office.

You can customize your phone system, within certain parameters that the provider offers and you make adds, moves and changes to your hosted VoIP system through a secure web portal.
The configuration is fairly simple. The VoIP handsets have an Ethernet cable that plugs into a data jack at each user’s workstation. If you only have a single data jack, the back of the phones have an Ethernet port that a computer can be plugged into, allowing the phone to serve as a bridge for your computer to reach the computer network. In the server room, the phones plug into a switch and the switch plugs into a router, where your WAN connection is connected.

If a company needs 100% perfect call quality, guaranteed, the service provider can deliver a private circuit to connect your site to their server. When this happens, the provider takes 100% responsibility to delivering perfect call quality.
If your office can tolerate a small glitch in voice quality on occasion, some providers will allow you to send your calls over the public Internet, back to their server. The factors that effect voice quality and latency, packet loss and jitter and since those things cannot be guaranteed over the public Internet, the hosted VoIP provider cannot guarantee that all of your calls will have perfect quality. The likelihood of call quality problems increases with your number of users but running calls over the public Internet saves your company the monthly cost of paying for a private voice circuit.

What’s in it for you?

Enjoy flexibility. Hosted VoIP is particularly scalable. You can rapidly scale or shrink your system nearly infinitely and since you are only charged on a per user basis, you only pay for what you need, as you need it.

More efficient use of time. Since adds, moves and changes to the phone system are now on a user-friendly, web portal and all phone system maintenance is handled by the service provider, your IT department can now make more efficient use of their time.

No sunk costs. Technology is improving extremely quickly and every year, phone system companies are finding new and better ways for companies to communicate. Since the service providers are always upgrading their servers, with hosted VoIP, you always have the latest and greatest technology. You can also experiment with a new features or technology, turning it on for one month, then turning it off a few months later if you don’t like it. No more having to go “all-in” and feel guilty if you don’t keep the phones or add-on features for 20 years.