If you’ve decided to move your business from standard landlines or PBX to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service, you’re about to enter a whole new world of options, features and integrated services. However, there’s more to switching to VoIP than just getting rid of your old phone system. You’ll want to take the following steps to get ready before jumping into a new system.
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.
Perhaps you’ve switched to a VoIP phone system for your small business, and you’re already benefiting from the lower costs and greater flexibility. But if you’re like many small business owners, chances are you’ve stopped short of maximizing the value of the new toolbox you’ve just received.
Since VoIP operates over the Internet, it opens up a whole world of cheap or free features that were once unattainable to companies with limited budgets—including some features you can’t even get on a traditional PBX phone system. While whole books could be written on the advantages of VoIP, let’s explore just a few key features that could help your business compete on a greater level.
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?
To suggest Internet-based VoIP phone service is taking over the world would be an understatement. According to numbers compiled by The VoIP Report, the Internet phone service market is predicted to grow by at least 10 percent per year, until 2021. For small businesses, one of the biggest driving factors behind this growth is finances: For any business operating on a budget, options that offer more services for less money are highly attractive. And VoIP in particular can provide a huge array of services for a fraction of cost on the standard Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). However, the savings don’t even end with the services themselves. Let’s look at a few other ways your company can save by switching to VoIP.
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.
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.
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.
