Microsoft Teams Phone System Pricing 2022

May 6, 2022 Mike Smith

Looking for Microsoft Teams Phone System pricing, for 2022? Let’s talk cost!

In the video below, Mike details his custom spreadsheet, showing you both the licensing and dial tone costs for Microsoft Teams Phone System. He covers pricing for license type, add-ons, calling plans, scaling, Operator Connect, Direct Routing as a Service, and more!

Does your company have over 50 employees, and you’d like Mike’s recommendations on the best vendors to quote for Direct Routing as a Service, or Operator Connect? Click the button below and ask him today.

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About Mike

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, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedInReddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

How much does Microsoft Teams Phone System cost in 2022? Great question. I try to make at least one of these videos every single yea because Microsoft changes a lot every single year. They change the names of things, they change the pricing of things, so I try to keep this updated every single year. So I’m going to do a video, I’m going to explain how much Teams Phone System costs in 2022.

Ask me what to quote

But before I get started, a quick plug, if you’d like my recommendations on the best dial tone providers to quote for Microsoft Teams Phone System, don’t Google it, just reach out and contact me, via email or by phone (714.593.0011). More information on that at the end of the video.

Research your M365 Licensing

All right. So, how much does Microsoft Teams Phone System cost in 2022? Well, it depends, so let me break it down to you. The one thing that I want to start with is that the cost can be broken down into two different categories, cost that you’re going to pay in licensing and costs you’re going to pay for dial tone. So let’s talk about the licensing first. One of the first questions you need to ask is, what license level of 365 are we currently using today? Do you have, for instance, Business Standard, or Business Premium, or do you have an Enterprise license like an E1, or an A1, or a G1, or E3, or E5? That makes a difference, so make sure you get that down right away.

Business Licensing Costs

Okay, so let’s take, for instance, if you have Business Standard or a Business Premium account. You have a couple different options. So your first option is to get a Teams phone with calling plan bundle, and what that does, it includes the Teams phone standard feature, which is the feature that you need within Teams to give you a dial pad and the calling features, and then it also includes a calling plan, that’s your dial tone, which we’ll talk about later. And that’s roughly $15 per month before discounts, so that’ll give you everything you need. So that’s your cost right there, $15 per month if that’s the option you want to go, that’s if you have Business Standard or Business Premium.

Enterprise Licensing Costs

If you have an Enterprise level account like an E1, E3, E5, or any of the other equivalents for government or nonprofit, things like that, if you have any of those accounts, you don’t have the option of getting the Teams phone with calling plan, instead, everything is a la carte. So what you’re going to have to do is buy the add-on Teams Phone Standard feature, which is $8 per month per user, and that gives you the dial pad within Teams and the features, but that does not give you the dial tone. That’s if you have an E1 or an E3. Now, if you have an E5, the Teams Phone Standard is included with E5, so you don’t need to purchase that as an add-on if you have E5, but with E5, you still don’t have dial tone. You have the ability to have a dial pad and all the features enabled included in E5 but you still don’t have any dial tone. So that’s the licensing, so that’s the licensing side, I hope that makes sense.

Microsoft Teams Phone System Pricing 2022

Direct Routing

Now, the second piece is dial tone. We talked about it a little bit, but you have several options for getting dial tone for Teams Phone System. The first option is direct routing. What that is, it’s a feature within Microsoft Teams that allows you to connect your company’s dial tone, your on-prem dial tone, so if you have SIP trunks, or an old PRI, or analog lines, you have dial tone coming in on-prem from your existing telecom service provider, and you want to connect that dial tone to Microsoft Teams, you can do that through a feature called direct routing. And so in that case, you have to add the cost of upgrading Teams licensing with the Teams Phone Standard, plus the cost of your dial tone that you’re paying today, and that’s how much Teams Phone System costs. You also have to manage an SBC, a session border controller, on-site, and you have to enable the direct routing features. So there’s some soft costs in there as well, you have to manage your own dial tone, you have to make sure you’re in charge of the call quality on all calls because you’re in charge of the dial tone. So that’s direct routing.

Cloud Dial Tone

Now, most medium and large companies do not go with direct routing, however, they go with cloud dial tone, and the reason why is they don’t want to manage their own dial tone, they have several locations all across the globe or across the country and they don’t want to manage SBCs everywhere. They also don’t want all the employees funneling back to headquarters to pull dial tone from one SBC or SIP trunks that are sitting there and have to rely on that, so a lot of companies want cloud dial tone. There’s a few options for cloud dial tone.

Under 50 Employees

If you’re a small company, say under 50 employees, the best way for you to get cloud dial tone is just get the calling plan from Microsoft. So if you have the Business Standard or Business Premium account with Microsoft, just get that Microsoft Teams phone bundle with calling plan. It’s $15 per user, it includes the cloud dial tone, that calling plan.

So if you’re under 50 employees and you don’t have a call center, you don’t have anything crazy going on, you don’t have anything fancy in terms of features or things like that that you need, just keep it simple and get the cloud dial tone for Microsoft by getting the calling plan.

Over 50 Employees

If you have more than 50 employees or you have an e-License like an E1, or E3, or E5, most companies over 50 employees, they get cloud dial tone from a third party service provider. So they get it from either an operator connect provider or they get it from a direct routing as a service provider. And either one works very similarly, you might want to reference back to the videos I’ve done comparing the two, but at the end of the day, the dial tone is coming from a third party who’s connecting your Teams instance to their dial tone through direct routing on the back end.

They’re doing the direct routing, that’s why some of it’s called direct routing as a service, but they’re doing the dial tone, they’re also handling all the customer service for your dial tone. They’re also helping you install the dial tone, so they’re helping you port numbers and go through the whole transition. And the cost of it is roughly around anywhere between, I’d say, $4, $5 per user to $15 per user, depending on the service provider that you use, depending on how many employees that your company has, things like that, so depending on your calling patterns. So the price varies quite a bit, if you have 60 employees, it’s hard to get $4, $5 a user, obviously you’re going to be paying more like $10, $12, $15 per user, but if you have thousands of employees or hundreds of thousands of employees, chances are you’re going to get close to $5, $6 a user, right around there as long as you don’t need a lot of extra features or extra redundancy, things like that, it just kind of depends.

Benefits of 3rd Party Dial Tone

But most of our customers who are medium to large size companies get their dial tone from a third party provider through either operator connect or direct routing as a service, and the cost is around $5 to $15 per live extension or per user per month. And the reason why they do that is because they get better installation support, better customer service support, and if you go to Microsoft direct for that dial tone, it’s a lot more expensive, it’s like $12 per month per user, no matter how big you are, which is kind of pricey and the customer service that you’re going to get with that is subpar compared to what you’re going to get from a third party.

So I hope that all makes sense, so think about it again, there’s the licensing cost to add the phone system. It used to be called phone system feature, now it’s Teams Phone Standard, so there’s that licensing add on, and then also the dial tone add on, so think of it as two separate things. So that’s the cost of Microsoft Teams Phone System in 2022, I hope that helped a little bit.

Ask me for the best 3rd party providers to quote

If you’d like my recommendations on the best direct routing as a service providers to quote for your medium to large size company or the best operator connect operators or service providers to quote for your company, don’t Google it, don’t just look on the admin portal for Microsoft, you’re probably going to end up with the wrong service provider. Just contact me via email, or by phone (714.593.0011). I’m happy to help.

Within a few questions, I’ll kind of narrow down the providers you should be quoting, I’ll introduce you to those companies, help you get quotes, and at the end of the day, the service providers pay me my broker fees. So you don’t have to pay me anything for doing this for you, so there’s absolutely no excuse not to at least reach out and ask me my opinion on this stuff, I’m happy to help.

All right, so if you liked the video, don’t forget to hit the like button down below and subscribe to our channel, and I will catch you on the next one.

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