A VoIP phone system is a technology to make phone calls through your internet connection instead of a regular landline or a mobile network. A VoIP system converts analog voice signals into digital signals over your broadband connection. A VoIP server is used to connect calls to other telephone networks. As long as you have a high-speed internet connection, which includes a router and modem, you are ready to use a VoIP.
It works even better than your traditional landline phone because it offers many more features than what analog phone service could ever provide. Since VoIP runs over the internet, your data is stored securely in the cloud. You can manage the VoIP system through an online dashboard. This dashboard allows users to adjust contacts, business phone numbers, call forwarding, and add new phone numbers. You probably already pay for internet service regardless of which phone system you use.
Cable and fiber broadband makes it possible to use internet phone service to cut out the costly telephone company. One of the top reasons VoIP has far outpaced traditional phone service is the flexibility and professional calling features for one low price.
We'll get to that in a bit. In the network diagram shown below, you can see that a hosted VoIP phone system consists of many devices, including smartphones, to provide unified business communication. When an employee calls a customer, they pick up the handset and dial them just as they normally would. From there, the VoIP provider establishes the call. If the network path to the called party supports a digital voice signal, then the call quality is upgraded to high definition.
Using a hosted VoIP system in your business is that simple. If you are a seasonal business with fluctuating communications needs or experiencing rapid growth, a hosted model can be a perfect fit for you.
VoIP services deliver a number of features that are either not supported by traditional telephone systems or only available for an additional fee. Many businesses have found it easy to use VoIP and became more competitive with the full suite of built-in features. Some features may help companies meet important safety and security needs, including the ability to connect with emergency services while using internet VoIP. Below is a list of must-have VoIP features that will boost your business communication efficiency:.
When the called party is unavailable, Call Forwarding helps redirect incoming calls to another desired destination, such as the mobile phone number or other telephone numbers. You can also set up different rules for various scenarios. For example, automatically forward phone calls to another extension when you are busy, ring your mobile phone when no one answers calls to your desk phone, and ask callers to leave voice messages when you are on vacation.
Sales personnel and field staff especially no longer need to worry about being away from their desks. When customers call in, pre-recorded greetings will direct them to the most appropriate destination with the minimum waiting time.
With IVR, you are able to automate customer service, provide satisfactory answers timely, leave a good impression on your customers, and build a professional company image. Include a group of extensions into a ring group so that when a call comes in, all available extensions will ring simultaneously or sequentially up to different ringing strategies you set up. It is very useful in sharing and distributing calls effectively among employees in particular departments.
As a result, the overall productivity of your team will be increased and the fastest response to customer calls is guaranteed. It is a smart move to let an incoming call queue up while waiting for an available agent. Better than being on hold, going to voicemail, or getting a busy tone, the customer is informed that there is currently no available agent to answer the call, and he or she is queueing right now.
It reduces the number of missed calls as well as the negative effect of busy signals on customer experience. By segmenting agents into several queues, you can even provide different service levels for different customer groups.
Phone calls may be put on hold sometimes, such as the intervals while you transfer a call to another number, or the waiting time when people participate in a conference call, or Nobody likes awkward silences, so just upload some audio files and customize the on-hold music to please your customers and enhance your corporate image. VoIP phone systems can be set up to automatically detect and record every phone conversation made over the system, including inbound and outbound calls.
Businesses usually leverage call recordings as training or coaching tool, to help resolve disputes, for the purpose of review and confirmation, for compliance with their regulations, and to track whether or not customers are satisfied.
VoIP technology makes them all simplified. We understand that some businesses might have been using traditional phone systems for quite a long time and are not sure whether a VoIP phone system makes sense for their businesses. There are indeed significant differences between VoIP and traditional landline. Here are some questions you could ask yourself before making an informed decision. Now the ISDN switch-off is happening all around the globe.
If you are among the trend, it is critical f to find a seamless and reliable VoIP solution in response to the shutdown. Otherwise, you could lose your telephone service.
This is called packet switching. While circuit switching keeps the connection open and constant, packet switching opens a brief connection -- just long enough to send a small chunk of data, called a packet , from one system to another. It works like this:. Packet switching is very efficient. It lets the network route the packets along the least congested and cheapest lines.
It also frees up the two computers communicating with each other so that they can accept information from other computers, as well. VoIP technology uses the Internet's packet-switching capabilities to provide phone service. VoIP has several advantages over circuit switching.
For example, packet switching allows several telephone calls to occupy the amount of space occupied by only one in a circuit-switched network. Using PSTN, that minute phone call we talked about earlier consumed 10 full minutes of transmission time at a cost of Kbps. With VoIP, that same call may have occupied only 3.
Based on this simple estimate, another three or four calls could easily fit into the space used by a single call under the conventional system. And this example doesn't even factor in the use of data compression , which further reduces the size of each call. Let's say that you and your friend both have service through a VoIP provider.
You both have your analog phones hooked up to the service-provided ATAs. Let's take another look at that typical telephone call, but this time using VoIP over a packet-switched network:. Probably one of the most compelling advantages of packet switching is that data networks already understand the technology.
By migrating to this technology, telephone networks immediately gain the ability to communicate the way computers do. It will still be at least a decade before communications companies can make the full switch over to VoIP. As with all emerging technologies, there are certain hurdles that have to be overcome. We'll look at those in the next section.
The current Public Switched Telephone Network is a robust and fairly bulletproof system for delivering phone calls. Phones just work, and we've all come to depend on that. On the other hand, computers, e-mail and other related devices are still kind of flaky. Let's face it -- few people really panic when their e-mail goes down for 30 minutes. It's expected from time to time.
On the other hand, a half hour of no dial tone can easily send people into a panic. So what the PSTN may lack in efficiency it more than makes up for in reliability. But the network that makes up the Internet is far more complex and therefore functions within a far greater margin of error. What this all adds up to is one of the major flaws in VoIP: reliability.
One of the hurdles that was overcome some time ago was the conversion of the analog audio signal your phone receives into packets of data. How it is that analog audio is turned into packets for VoIP transmission? The answer is codecs. A codec, which stands for coder-decoder , converts an audio signal into compressed digital form for transmission and then back into an uncompressed audio signal for replay.
It's the essence of VoIP. Codecs accomplish the conversion by sampling the audio signal several thousand times per second. For instance, a G. It converts each tiny sample into digitized data and compresses it for transmission.
When the 64, samples are reassembled, the pieces of audio missing between each sample are so small that to the human ear, it sounds like one continuous second of audio signal. There are different sampling rates in VoIP depending on the codec being used:.
Codecs use advanced algorithms to help sample, sort, compress and packetize audio data. The codec works with the algorithm to convert and sort everything out, but it's not any good without knowing where to send the data. In VoIP, that task is handled by soft switches. This is the numbering system that phone networks use to know where to route a call based on the dialed numbers. A phone number is like an address:.
The switches use "" to route the phone call to the area code's region. The "" prefix sends the call to a central office, and the network routes the call using the last four digits, which are associated with a specific location. Based on that system, no matter where you're in the world, the number combination " " always puts you in the same central office, which has a switch that knows which phone is associated with " They look for IP addresses, which look like this:.
IP addresses correspond to a particular device on the network like a computer, a router, a switch, a gateway or a telephone.
However, IP addresses are not always static. They're assigned by a DHCP server on the network and change with each new connection. This mapping process is handled by a central call processor running a soft switch. Think of the user and the phone or computer as one package -- man and machine.
That package is called the endpoint. The soft switch connects endpoints. The soft switch contains a database of users and phone numbers. If it doesn't have the information it needs, it hands off the request downstream to other soft switches until it finds one that can answer the request. Once it finds the user, it locates the current IP address of the device associated with that user in a similar series of requests. It sends back all the relevant information to the softphone or IP phone, allowing the exchange of data between the two endpoints.
Soft switches work in tandem with network devices to make VoIP possible. For all these devices to work together, they must communicate in the same way. This communication is one of the most important aspects that will have to be refined for VoIP to take off. As we've seen, on each end of a VoIP call we can have any combination of an analog, soft or IP phone as acting as a user interface, ATAs or client software working with a codec to handle the digital-to-analog conversion, and soft switches mapping the calls.
How do you get all of these completely different pieces of hardware and software to communicate efficiently to pull all of this off? The answer is protocols. There are several protocols currently used for VoIP.
These protocols define ways in which devices like codecs connect to each other and to the network using VoIP. They also include specifications for audio codecs. The most widely used protocol is H. It provides specifications for real-time, interactive videoconferencing, data sharing and audio applications such as VoIP. Actually a suite of protocols, H. As you can see, H. That's what allows it to be used for so many applications. The problem with H. An alternative to H.
Smaller and more efficient than H. MGCP is geared toward features like call waiting. You can learn more about the architecture of these protocols at Protocols.
One of the challenges facing the worldwide use of VoIP is that these three protocols are not always compatible. The difference lies in the transmission.
So how is it different from landline phones? IP phones transmit voice data digitally, whereas landline phones are limited to just that — landlines.
The advantage of IP phones is that these digital signals can be transmitted anywhere across the internet by using nothing but your regular internet connection, thereby bypassing the trunks and cables, and therefore the charges, laid down by telephone companies. The demand for IP phones is ever-increasing, across large and small organizations. The advantages are clear and quantifiable. Another defining quality of IP phones is that you can use them in any location where you have internet connection.
The IP phone itself does not rely on the physical location of the office. IP phones can be used in any location, making it easy for expanding and working remotely. This aspect makes IP phones flexible when moving offices and working remotely. Employers can provide remote workers with an IP phone at the office and a second IP phone for home, where both phones would ring identically and can be answered from either location. The key is that an IP phone system gives your company the economic and long term benefits it needs to grow.
The IP phone system takes away a significant amount of on-site labor that goes into managing a phone system.
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