Thinking About Buying a
VoIP Business Phone System?

When we first installed a VoIP business phone system, I recall thinking about something a guy I once worked with used to say - that our business is 90% boredom and 10% terror. I just might have swapped those numbers in the early days of business voip.

Actually, I'm exaggerating but still, my whole life had been about "five 9's" - a way of saying that a system is very reliable, up and running without problems 99.999% of the time.

Internet telephony was kind of scary at first. When we put those first H.323 phones (H.323 is a protocol for communication across IP networks), in the field running across dedicated bandwidth, it was pretty cool.

Of course, we also had customers using shared bandwidth for phone calls (as opposed to dedicated bandwidth - think cable modem, DSL, the public internet) and that was fun - not:

• Calls would just suddenly disconnect


• There would be delays in voice transmission


• Callers heard echo

Home VoIP phone service made a splash when cable television providers started selling service bundles that included internet and phone service. Outages were more common than with the old Bell lines though and business owners often viewed business VoIP solutions skeptically after their experience at home.

We've come a long way since then. In fact, we use VoIP exclusively at our offices. It gives us flexibility and the cost is so much lower than our old copper trunks. Our customers who have T1 and PRI circuits also save a lot of money. (Call us in Austin and we'll explain how.)

It's a fine line to walk between providing relevant, useful information and burdening a customer with too much technical mumbo jumbo. The challenge (and the bottom line) is to identify problems to solve and opportunities to improve the way companies do business.

If this section of articles on our site helps you better understand what all the 'noise' is about, what it means to your bottom line, and what questions about a VoIP business phone system you want to ask (and have answered clearly and concisely by your vendor), then we've done our job.