The rise of hybrid work means many companies now need to provide voice communications for employees at home as well as when they return to the office. At the same time, other channels have become equally important, including conference calls, mobile communications, text messaging, video conferencing, and social media. For these and other reasons, Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is and will remain the go-to solution for businesses of all sizes.
VoIP systems rose to prominence not just because they’re less expensive than on-premises PBX (private branch exchange) systems, but because they’re mostly software, making them far more flexible. There’s nothing an old-fashioned PBX can do that a VoIP system can’t, but there’s a very long list of things you can do with VoIP that aren’t possible using on-premises hardware. Even residential VoIP includes features that are impossible with conventional telephone systems.
With a VoIP system, you can manage all your voice communications from a central web console no matter how many extensions you have, where your employees are, or even what devices they’re using. In addition, most systems also offer features like call recording, video conferencing, and team collaboration.
Even more advanced VoIP solutions provide additional functionality through software. Because they work across a broad array of channels and offer huge feature sets, many of these systems are classified as Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS). These are generally cloud-based, virtual PBXes that take VoIP a step further by integrating with other software systems to enhance business processes.
When you combine these capabilities with pricing that’s generally much less expensive than an old-fashioned PBX and which requires little to no up-front capital expenditure, VoIP is a clear winner.
Planning for VoIP
How to get started? Your first step should be to figure out exactly how you want your business to use a phone system. If you have an existing PBX, replacing it entirely might not be a viable option, if only because some parts of the system can’t be easily changed over to softphones or even desktop VoIP handsets.
For example, suppose you have a heavy manufacturing environment with outdoor activities, such as a steel fabrication yard or a landscaping company. In that case, your rugged old outdoor phones may be just what you need there, and VoIP should only be deployed for office and remote workers. You should also decide which capabilities of the old system you’ll need to keep and what features you think will be necessary for the future.
When planning, it’s important to include stakeholders from all the critical parts of your business. Naturally, this includes the IT staff and the data security folks, since your voice calls will now be data communications. But the workers who will be using the system to get work done should have their say, too, especially those whose work directly drives revenue and engages customers.
Remember, a VoIP system is much more than just a new set of phones. VoIP platforms, and especially UCaaS systems, can have very long feature lists. But you’ll pay for those features, and it’s entirely possible that some systems will pack in more than you’ll ever need. Think carefully about which features would add real value to your organization.
Maximum VoIP: How UCaaS Boosts Your Business
So far we’ve talked about replacing traditional PBX systems with VoIP, but simply switching from analog voice to digital offers only marginal cost savings. The real value of software-based communications comes from opportunities for flexibility and integration that you can’t get any other way—which takes us to the fast-evolving UCaaS paradigm mentioned above.
The features offered in any particular UCaaS solution vary widely from vendor to vendor. Still, most include options for video conferencing, shared meeting and online collaboration tools, integrated faxing, and mobile VoIP integration. Most also offer device-independent softphone clients, which are software that essentially turns your PC or smart device into an extension on the VoIP system. For remote workers, that’s a game-changer. And softphones are often the only tool for workers in call centers because they’re the front-end window to any CRM or help desk integration, which is a must-have for that job.
A softphone can also combine telephone conversations with text chat and screen sharing. This creates a collaboration session where the group shares screens, documents, and data—no prep, no reserved lines, just button clicks. In the case of a CRM integration, the system might recognize the customer’s phone number or some other identifier and automatically pull up the customer’s record for the technician or salesperson answering the call. It could even alert a manager to monitor the call if it’s a critical client.
These are the basics of UCaaS, but the concept is constantly evolving to include more communication and collaboration technologies. For example, some vendors offer industry-specific features for certain verticals, such as healthcare. These backend software integrations explain the significant growth in the UCaaS market over the last several years, as recent research from Statista bears out.
UCaaS Projected Market Growth in US Through 2024
It’s worth considering just how much integration you need, however, because options abound. For example, RingCentral’s softphone offers a long list of app integrations and features, including not just collaboration platforms but bi-directional email and scheduling. Line2‘s softphone client, on the other hand, is specifically designed to be simple so users can pick it up quickly. These two ends of the spectrum mean you should be careful when testing these systems to ensure you’re getting only the features you need delivered in the right way for how your company operates.
The Nitty-Gritty of VoIP Tech
UCaaS is the highest layer of the VoIP technology stack. But even if you don’t consider yourself tech-savvy, it’s helpful to understand a little about some of the underlying technologies that make it work before you make your purchase.
At its heart, VoIP is a method of digitizing voice signals and then sending digital voice information over an internet protocol (IP) network. The analog voice information is translated into digital packets and back again using software called a codec. But those are just the basics.
For a VoIP system to work, it needs to route calls between users and the outside world. It does this via a virtual PBX that your VoIP provider manages in the cloud. You’re essentially sharing a large PBX with that provider’s other customers, but because these companies use multi-tenant segmentation, your PBX will appear dedicated to you. The vast majority of businesses also need to route calls to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and vendors handle this in various ways.
A key technology behind VoIP call routing is known as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and you’re sure to hear vendors mention it often. SIP is a text-based protocol that’s built on an easy request/response model, similar to HTML, and it’s used for the vast majority of modern VoIP phone systems. It also handles phone service, video conferencing, and several other tasks just fine, which is why its use is so widespread. Unfortunately, it has trouble with data security, but more on that in a bit.
What makes SIP so popular is not only that it’s deep and flexible, but also because it was purpose-built to engage in multimedia (meaning not just audio but also video and even text) communications over IP networks. But it can also handle other functions, including session setup (initiating a call at the phone you’re calling), presence management (giving an indicator of whether a user is “available,” “away,” etc.), location management (target registration), and call monitoring.
VoIP and Your Internet Connection
After SIP, even further down the VoIP rabbit-hole is the network itself. All VoIP calls will traverse an IP network at some point, and probably more than one. Most VoIP packets will spend some time on your internal home or business network before making their way out to the broader internet, so you’ll need to understand a few things about how that works, too.
Your internet connection will need to meet certain minimum throughput levels for upstream and downstream data for the best voice quality. In addition, you’ll also need to meet a minimum latency level (that is, the time between when a signal leaves a remote computer and when your system receives it), which is typically measured in milliseconds.
Security is also a concern. VoIP traffic can be intercepted, just like any other network traffic. At a minimum, it’s important to have a router that can create virtual LANs (VLANs) and also has the ability to encrypt your voice traffic. These days, you need end-to-end VoIP security for any call.
For larger systems, and for systems where security is critical for things like being compliant to vertical regulatory needs, your current internet connection might not be adequate. The internet doesn’t do quality of service (QoS), which means your actual available bandwidth can be unpredictable. Network congestion can ruin a conference call, and activities such as DNS hijacking can put your business and data at risk. That means your VoIP system must have access to a business-class internet link, so discuss these needs with your company’s internet service provider (ISP)—and for 2022, think fiber.
And while we all love the internet, it’s not necessarily the safest place for your business voice communications. Remember that while the internet uses the IP protocol and VoIP runs over IP, that doesn’t mean that VoIP must run over the internet. You can get all the UCaaS software benefits we’ve mentioned by running your voice network over dedicated lines. It’ll cost more, but it will also ensure crystal clear voice quality and the highest level of data security.
How VoIP Impacts Your Internal Network
Don’t ignore the fact that VoIP can also increase pressure on your local area network (LAN). If you simply drop VoIP onto your network, that traffic will be processed the same as any other traffic. Your shared accounting application, or that employee who’s moving 20 gigabytes of files to the cloud, will get the same priority as a phone call.
The problem is that VoIP traffic is much more sensitive to network bumps and potholes than most general office traffic. When a VoIP system is starved for bandwidth, that translates to garbled conversations, difficulty connecting, or dropped and lost calls. If your business is small and your network consists of one or two wireless routers, then your configuration and testing headaches might be fairly easy. These tasks can be complex and time-consuming for medium and larger networks, which translates into added cost.
Fortunately, most of the providers we reviewed have engineering staff that will contact you as part of your setup process to help your IT staffers test and optimize your network prior to deployment. That’s definitely something we recommend, even if it costs extra, but there are steps you can take now to prep your LAN for VoIP and make the deployment process that much easier.
For one, be sure to understand QoS, which we mentioned above. Most business-grade networking hardware will be able to handle QoS in more than one way, so testing which method will handle voice traffic more smoothly in your environment is important.
Next, you’ll want to research codecs. This technology is what really gives each call its voice quality because it controls how voice data is compressed, which in turn affects bandwidth usage. Multiple proprietary and open-source voice codecs are available so know which is supported by your networking equipment and your VoIP vendor.
Last, you’ll want to take a close look at your current network monitoring tools. At its core, VoIP is simply a specific kind of network traffic, so in the end, it’ll be these tools that allow you to see that traffic and manage it across your network. Make sure that the tools you’re using support VoIP’s needs, especially around QoS, traffic analysis, and network congestion issues.
Once you’ve engaged with a VoIP provider, their engineers will help you determine your network’s basic “VoIP readiness factor” and how to tweak their service and optimize your network so VoIP can run effectively over your infrastructure.
To learn more about the 10 Best Business VoIP Providers for 2022, read more at source: PCMag
