Microsoft Teams Phone System: Calling Plan

If your company wants to use Microsoft Teams for your phone system, you’re going to have to purchase a calling plan…

The calling plan will be approximately $12/month, on top of your company’s Office 365 E3 or E5 license.

But you don’t have to purchase the calling plan from Microsoft. There are alternatives, which might be better for your company. Watch this video to learn more.

Which hosted VoIP providers (offering Teams), should your company quote? Click below to ask Mike!

Ask Mike

About the Host
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript:

Okay, so your company is interested in researching using Microsoft Teams for your phone system. Okay, so once you figure out that you’ve got to have an E5 license with a phone system feature, and you need a calling plan, one thing I’ve talked about before in other videos is you can actually utilize a third-party hosted VoIP provider who will deliver a native Microsoft Teams phone system platform to your users, and they charge you about the same amount, $12 per user, per month.

And the nice thing is they can actually utilize your existing E5 license, so you don’t have to cancel your E5 subscription through your existing MSP or through Microsoft. You can actually use this third-party provider and they’ll utilize your existing E5 license. Some of them also could sell you an E5 license, if you don’t have one already, and you’re looking for a good MSP to use. They also can serve as your MSP and sell you the E5 license or they can use your existing E5 license.

And the way it works (to where they’re able to deliver dial tone for you, for your Microsoft phone system), is through direct routing. So in essence, you’re getting your Microsoft Teams environment through Office 365, directly through Microsoft, and then that third-party hosted VoIP provider is using direct routing to connect directly to Microsoft. So that when you go to pick up the phone and make a call, the dial tone is actually coming from that third-party hosted VoIP provider instead of Microsoft direct, via direct routing.

And that’s sometimes a good option because you get a lot more hands-on support from the third-party hosted VoIP provider than you would necessarily sometimes, going through Microsoft direct.

So, yes you can use a third-party hosted VoIP provider, and yes they can utilize your existing E5 Office 365 license.

I hope that helped a little bit, and if you have any questions or you’d like some recommendations on the best vendors to quote for these things, please reach out, I’m happy to help.

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Call Mike: 877-465-3505