5 Advantages of IP Phones

There are pretty much only two alternatives for business communications these days — you can use POTS, or Plain Old Telephone Service, which refers to the old-style copper wires, or you can use the newer style VoIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol telephony. Although there are still advantages to be had using POTS service, the old adage "time is money" certainly applies, since you pay for every minute you spend using the phone. You pay more for long-distance calls, and international calling is much more expensive as well.

You want there to be a better way, don't you?

Sure you do. And there is a better way — Voice Over Internet Protocol. It conveys many advantages over POTS networks. Let's go over a few of them.

Saving Money

The number one advantage that you'll enjoy after switching to IP Phones is the money you'll save using them. Since these phones run on your existing broadband Internet connection, you won't need a separately maintained phone network. All you'll need is an Internet connection with enough bandwidth to support all the callers you plan to have, plus overhead for people surfing.

You'll also enjoy your communications bills being consolidated. Instead of getting one for broadband Internet, and another for phone service, you'll just get the former. Not only that, but where the phone bill could be wildly variable based on your calling patterns, when using VoIP your communication bill will be one fixed amount, based on the bandwidth you've requested be available to you.

Indeed, studies have revealed that VoIP can potentially save an organization up to 40% on local calls. This is because VoIP uses the Internet as a backbone for call transport. It can therefore save you up to 90% on long distance and international calls, as well.

Conference Calling

With POTS service, it's hard to have more than two people talking on the same call. With VoIP, it's easy to have a conference with a whole team of people talking in real time. It's simple to work with more calls on the same access line when using VoIP, since VoIP compresses its data packets for transmission, making them easier to work with.

Flexibility

Are you still attached to your old phone? Get a VoIP phone adapter! Don't want to get new VoIP phones? You can get software to turn your computers into softphones instead. All you'll need in that case is speakers and microphones. Want to do video conferencing? Easy as pie. All you need are webcams and the appropriate software. Since the transport medium is the Internet, anything that can typically be moved over the Internet can be moved through VoIP as well. That means voice, data, video and so on.

Auto Attendant

One of the often overlooked gems of premium VoIP services, an automatic attendant is a feature that will instantly make your business appear larger than it is. To the customer calling without any prior knowledge, your enterprise will seem bigger, more impressive, and more professional. And the auto attendant is really a very simple feature — all it will do is answer calls automatically, play a phone menu for the caller, and direct them to the correct department as per their button press. The caller never needs to know how many people are in that department, or how big your office is. Just having that auto attendant in place will impress them.

Excellent Call Management

When you were using your POTS network, the best call management you got was a list of numbers called, the time the call was made, and the length of the call. And it was all on paper, making it hard to work with in the first place. Not so with VoIP. With VoIP you get contact lists, better contact management; with large installations you can manage your entire setup from one console, making problem resolution easy. You can also generate reports using any available criteria.

Michelle Patterson has been learning and writing about the new IP based communication technologies. She loves sharing her information so that businesses and business owners could take advantage of these technologies.