small business telecom Archives

The Explosive Growth of VoIP for Small Business

As technology makes advanced communications more accessible and more affordable to the public, Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) is seeing a remarkable surge of popularity, especially among small businesses. Indeed, these days it seems we’re hard pressed to find a company that isn’t going with VoIP, and that trend will only continue. Global News Wire projects that by 2021, the VoIP services market will hit $140 billion, up from $83 billion in 2015. Meanwhile, VoIP Review predicts a market value of $194.5 billion by 2024, reflecting an increase of more than 130 percent in less than a decade.

What makes VoIP so popular, even necessary, for small businesses? Let’s look a few factors that may be driving the market.

A Short and To-the-Point Small Business VoIP Buyers Guide

So you’ve decided that a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system is the best move for your small business—but now the real decision making begins. In recent years, VoIP has become so popular that carriers and vendors have flooded the marketplace, offering a huge array of plans, equipment, accessories, etc. How can you figure out the best solution for your company’s needs?

0 Limitations to VoIP and How to Overcome Them

For many small businesses these days, switching their phone service from the standard landline telephone to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) makes sense from both an economic and technological point of view. However, VoIP also has some disadvantages, and you may need to take steps to compensate until the technology catches up. Let’s explore three prominent limitations of VoIP and what you can do about them.

0 Moving Your Business to VoIP Service: Pros and Cons

Internet-based phone service (Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP) offers a range of flexibility and features that aren’t available with conventional telephone service. However, you must be willing to deal with a few tradeoffs to get those added features. If you’re thinking about moving your business over to VoIP, let’s consider a few of these advantages and disadvantages.

0 What Equipment Does My Business Need to Switch over to VoIP?

If you’re thinking about switching your business telephone service to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP, or phone service over the Internet), you might be wondering about the startup requirements. Will you need special hardware? What equipment will you need to make the switch?

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to setting up VoIP service. The primary need for any VoiP service is a high-speed Internet connection, which most companies already have in place. Typically, smaller businesses need only a minimal amount of additional equipment, especially for cloud-based VoIP where the servers are located offsite. If your business requires a larger premises-based service (PBX), you may need more hardware, more servers and additional infrastructure. Let’s look at a few of the more common scenarios.

0 Cloud Solutions: Hosted Exchange Email

Email has effectively become the communications bloodstream of business today. Messages endlessly travel back and forth between teammates, as well as between a company and its clients. Most companies need to access and share this data among teammates and across multiple devices–without clogging up everyone’s computer hard drives. The solution: Hosted exchange email, a centralized, cloud-based system by which email and other shared communications can be stored, retrieved and accessed across many devices and platforms.

0 An Introduction to Cloud Solutions

Thanks to the miracle of high-speed Internet, many small business IT and telecom solutions don’t have to live on-site with your company. Instead, you simply store and access them via the “cloud.” (Of course, “cloud” is a metaphor—we’re talking about storage and access via an external server, not some mythical digital “cloud.”)

Businesses are quickly catching on to the wonder of cloud computing, taking it to new heights (pun intended). According to Forbes, companies currently spend four times more on cloud solutions than they spend on other IT. At a predicted growth rate of 19 percent per year, cloud computing will likely grow to a $162 billion industry by 2020.

0 A Guide to Small Business IT and Telecom Solutions: An Overview

As the owner of a growing small business, you’re likely wearing what feels like hundreds of different hats. At times (and sometimes simultaneously), you’re a product developer, marketing representative, project manager, supervisor, payroll accountant, phone answerer, stamp licker, coffee-getter…need we go on?

With all these details, the last thing you want to worry about is your company’s IT and telecom systems. Yet, at some point, something is going to force these issues to the top of your priority list. Perhaps something already has. Maybe you’ve outgrown your current infrastructure; perhaps you don’t have enough phone lines to accommodate the calls, or perhaps your website keeps crashing because your customers are maxing out your bandwidth. Maybe you’ve experienced a security breach. Or maybe you’re the proactive type and you don’t want to wait for a crisis before you address these issues. (If so, kudos to you!)