Telephony has come a long way since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. The ubiquity of the internet and cloud-based services has enabled telephone to take on a whole new image. Where once only large companies could afford all the fancy bells and whistles, these features are now available to small businesses at a very affordable price—often less than the cost of a plain old telephone system (POTS).

Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP uses the Internet as a means of sending voice transmissions, and leverages cloud-hosted services as the means of controlling the phone network. All of that sounds very complicated. It is. But you don’t have to understand how it works to benefit from it.

Some of the features offered by VoIP are the ones you’d find only in big business. Features like automated attendants that route calls based on callers’ actions, and find me/follow me, which rings multiple phones together or in sequence until someone answers. These features and others give small businesses a big presence. And unlike the expensive on-premise PBX systems, cloud-hosted VoIP systems are easier to configure, using graphical flow charts to design complex call routing.

If you have a very small office or home office with five phones or less and decent Internet service, you can often upgrade to VoIP without any additional hardware other than the phones. VoIP phones simply plug into your existing ethernet network. If your Internet service is not so good or you will have more than just a few people on the phone concurrently you may need to upgrade your Internet service, your internal network, or both.

VoIP is a good solution for any business from 2 to 200 people that wants all the features of big businesses, but on a smaller budget. Since no expensive proprietary equipment is needed, this solution scales well for small business.

So what does VoIP cost? Our service starts at $20/month per phone for the service, plus the cost of the phones. That includes the cloud-hosted PBX and all the features. Call or write us if you’d like a quote.

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