Making the decision to shift to hosted VoIP
A few companies have been in contact with us about shifting to a hosted VoIP service. It sounds appealing, but we're not sure how to compare this against what we're doing now.

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Hosted VoIP offers many advantages over conventional telephony service. In most cases, larger companies typically own their phone system – the PBX – and get connectivity from their incumbent telco. This is a very reliable solution, but offers little in the way of new features or integration with other modes of communication. As VoIP becomes more mainstream, these conventional solutions will also become increasingly expensive relative to more current solutions, and hence, more difficult to justify.

The hosted solution is a different model, and is very well suited for businesses that want to lower their telephony costs, and are not focused on owning their telephony equipment. Research indicates this message is especially relevant to small and medium-sized businesses – SMBs – who do not want to make the capital investment in a PBX, but still want the advance features that come with such systems. In these cases, hosted represents an upgrade in terms of the features their current telephony systems provide – typically a Key System – but at a fraction of the cost. Hosted also appeals to SMBs because it puts the onus for managing the network on the service provider instead of the business. Most SMBs have limited IT expertise, especially to support VoIP, so for them, hosted is the fastest and most practical way to adopt VoIP.

This was first published in July 2008