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I my last article I showed that buying a phone system can cost about half of a hosted VoIP service over three years, but didn’t get into maintenance costs or service quality.
One of the selling points of hosted VoIP is no equipment to maintain - they have easy point and click interfaces for making updates. Turns out many modern phone systems like Talkswitch and Allworx also have easy to use interfaces for making updates. Either way updates won’t require professional help, meaning lower ongoing costs and easier updates.
While either a hosted VoIP service or a phone system could suffer an outage, an out of warranty phone system could lead to repair costs. But for example an out-of-warranty Talkswitch repair is $250-500, a small risk relative to the more than $10,000 savings over hosted VoIP solutions.
Most hosted VoIP services include phone and email support, a very reassuring thing for small businesses to know experts are on hand and the clock isn’t running. But on the phone systems side Talkswitch includes free phone and email support for life, so again, no advantage to hosted VoIP here either.
But every once in a while rather than talk to some entry level technician, you need an expert - maybe even an expert to come onsite. Few hosted VoIP services offer onsite technicians and getting up the ranks to speak to an engineer can be difficult. Local phone systems vendors are easy to get ahold of and get onsite - and those coming out are generally system experts.
Bottom line is ongoing maintenance costs on hosted VoIP vs a phone system are fairly comparable and the support options for phone systems are better.
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 Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Phone Systems. 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.
