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Given the economy and savings that VoIP offers, its not surprising that so many businesses are looking at Voice Over IP phone service. But VoIP isn’t like traditional phone service – here’s a few things to know when you go shopping.
The first step is making sure your internet access is good enough for VoIP. I recommend using both VoIPSpear and Visualware’s tools for checking your internet connection. If both come back good, then you’re ready to proceed, otherwise talk to your VoIP provider or telecom consultant about internet access options.
http://www.voipspear.com/
http://myvoipspeed.visualware.com/
The rest of the shopping should come down to picking plans and making sure the carrier has a good network. Plans typically come in three styles:
• Local lines – these lines include free local calling and inexpensive long distance.
• Unlimited LD lines – these lines include “unlimited” long distance typically in the continental US, sometimes Canada as well. “Unlimited” typically means 5000 minutes.
• Metered plans – these plans have very low base charges, then all calls are charged a low per minute fee.
While most businesses gravitate to the unlimited lines, we find most actually pay less on local or metered plans.
Its important to ask VoIP providers about their POP (point of presence) locations – if you’re in Seattle typically a carrier with a Seattle-area POP is a better bet than an East-Coast POP as the data has to travel less and cross fewer carriers. Its also important they have a redundant infrastructure – multiple POPs and redundant connections to each POP reduces the chances of an outage. Many carriers also offer “disaster recovery” routing so if your internet access goes down, calls can redirect to other numbers.
With a little shopping and planning VoIP can be as good if not better than traditional phone service – and the savings can be amazing.
The Author: Kevin Selkowitz
About: Kevin Selkowitz is the founder and lead consultant for Selkowitz Technology, a Seattle-area small business systems consulting company. We focus on the four major technology needs of small businesses - phone systems, phone and internet service, servers/network infrastructure, and business applications.
This entry was posted by Kevin Selkowitz, on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 11:16 am and is filed under Phone and Internet Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response on the right, or trackback from your own site.
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