Small Business IP Telephony

Managed IP telephony is the process by which a company begins to move from the traditional landline phone to the swiftly descending VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) and looks to a service provider to manage the transition. Small business IP telephony has become the next tidal wave in the technological evolution and poses some very difficult hurdles for many small to middle businesses to overcome. The first giant hurdle is the massive cost to move from traditional landline phones to the VoIP telecommunications configuration. Companies are gasping for working capital and yet are feeling the pressure to move quickly into Internet protocol telephone service. Why the rush? Their competitors are savings thousands and maybe tens of thousands of dollars a year on phone bills and that is money that can be used for advertising, marketing or hiring of key staff persons to take them to the next level. So the small and middle businesses are caught in the Venus flytrap of a Catch 22.

Statistics tell us that the companies with between one and one hundred phones will be the most likely to move quickly on the new technology. Managed Internet protocol telephony will be the only way to do so for the majority of those companies. These companies will be willing to pay for someone else to handle the delivery, the setup and installation of a few stations at a time. These companies do not have the manpower nor the time away from the notorious gristmill that has become the survival mode of the twenty first century for most businesses both large and small. Small business IP telephony will be managed financially by leasing the equipment and not buying it, at least for the foreseeable future according to telecommunications experts. Quality of service will become the responsibility of the IP managers and not the company leasing the equipment. The bottom is that in the vast majority of cases, managed IP telephony will devise or create ways to make it easier and easier for holdout companies to move to this technology with creative and even innovative ways of integrating both the old and the new.

If a company has a strong IT team, a self determined approach to transition can be anticipated. This means that the IT team's focus could be taken away from standard service issues to deal with the bugs always present in a new technology. This is a not so managed approach. Another approach would be to place an IP PBX at the company site and the company providing the managed IP telephony could service the PBX unit over the Internet. There could be a number of issues that would be able to be addressed online. A third way to small business IP telephony that is managed by an outside provider would be to place rented or leased equipment at the company site. "By this we know that love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments." (1 John 5:2)

Fourthly, a managed approach to small business IP telephony would be for a customer to rent some space from another client's server to manage their own telecommunication needs. They would pay on an as used basis, enabling them to not spend so much on renting a server entirely for their own use. Managed IP telephony providers would be able to provide assurances that data would not be shared with the other partner in the sharing process and would have to give guarantees to the assurance. Making a symphony happen out of a network of both VoIP and analog system phones can be a daunting task, but one that many managed IP telephony providers relish. So are there any downsides to the VoIP configuration for telecommunications?

Those wanting to pursue small business IP telephony need to remember that unless there is power backup for the IP PBX and all the network stations, there is no phone system if the power goes down. The good old analog telephone of the past could still operate, but the shiny new IP phones will not work when a tornado, lightning, high winds, floods or any other natural disaster hits. Generators large enough to handle the power to one hundred computers and the PBX will have to be fairly substantial and even more so if any of the other lighting or essential services also have to be brought on line by emergency power. These generators or battery backups will be pretty expensive and it may be reasonable to keep one or two traditional landlines available for just those sorts of issues. Then there is the nagging issue of voice quality.

More and more VoIP providers are talking about having the same voice quality as the traditional phone company can offer, and that may be true, but there are still some doubts from time to time. There may be some echoes, screeches, and other strange noises from time to times with some VoIP providers. There may be some dropped calls once in a while, just as there are with cell phones calls. And there is the big issue that might prove to be a life and death issue: no traditional 911 service with IP telephony service. In most cases, emergency calls from VoIP providers are routed to a different call center than your local dispatch center and there may not be a name and address display at that center. Result? Well, that's up to the reader to decide.

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