Despite all the advances in telecommunications, the decades-old telephone remains the primary line of communication for many businesses and individuals.
There have been some improvements over time, most notably in the form of mobile phones, but these are of limited benefit – they certainly enable mobility, but mobile numbers can look unprofessional, and you can easily miss clients who try to catch you at your desk.
Recently, VoIP has started to see widespread adoption, offering substantial benefits both to in-office and mobile working as well as cost reductions. Before we can cover the benefits, though, we need to answer a simple question: what is VoIP?
What Is VoIP?
When people think of VoIP services, many of them will immediately think of Skype and wonder what a piece of software has to do with business telephony. While Skype is an example of VoIP technology, it certainly doesn’t demonstrate everything VoIP has to offer.
Fundamentally, VoIP means carrying voice traffic, which would traditionally be handled by the packet-switching telephone network, over internet infrastructure instead. This may not seem like a massive difference, but bearing in mind the age of the telephone infrastructure compared to the constantly improving fibre and copper internet infrastructure, you can begin to see where the benefits can come from.
How Your Business Can Benefit from VoIP
There are a number of benefits of VoIP, but the easiest to sell may be the cost. Traffic on telephone networks is expensive – just look at any landline phone bill. These may be small costs per unit, but for businesses which rely on telephone communication they will add up quickly. Comparatively, internet data traffic costs next to nothing – the vast majority of even home internet plans have no data limits at all. This means that carriage charges for VoIP traffic, regardless of whether they are through a small home provider or from wholesale VOIP providers like www.idtexpress.com, can be trivial.
Alongside the cost savings, VoIP can empower mobile working by giving workers the same phone number regardless of where they are working from – their desk, their home or their mobile.
VoIP adoption may not cause an instant night-to-day transformation, but it brings with it a host of small but by no means negligible improvements which can bring substantial benefits to any size of business.
