What is the difference between a VOIP or IP telephone system and a Digital telephone system?
VOIP telephone systems, also known as IP telephone systems are becoming increasingly popular as a alternative to traditional digital telephone systems. Businesses should look at the pros and cons to ensure that the most effective system is in place for there business needs.
There are several key differences and certainly a number of advantages VOIP or IP telephone systems (Voice Over Internet Protocol) hold over the more traditional digital telephone systems.
Fundamentally the purpose of integrating VOIP telephony over the digital alternative is to increase flexibility and cut costs across the board whilst allowing staff to keep in contact wherever in the world they may be.
Where the initial outlay on a state of the art VOIP telephone system may be slightly more than a traditional PBX (which means Private Branch Exchange) the advantages for the future are appealing to businesses more and more each day,
and have kick-started the VOIP revolution of recent years.
VOIP has also become popular with the use of applications like Skype and Google talk, however, these system use alot of bandwdith and not as effective as dedicated business systems.
One of the key advantages of a VOIP telephone system is utilising the ability to link multiple sites associated to one business so that they can contact one another completely free of charge.
This ensures unified communication throughout the business. An example of this would be the receptionist at head office speaking to another user on a site 100 miles away, this call would be free of charge as the sites are VOIP linked and would act as an internal call as if the two were in the same office using a traditional PBX, very appealing when thousands of minutes are used each day between large businesses on various sites across the UK are still being charged at standard pence per minute rates.
Yet another key advantage which may be more appealing to small businesses when expanding into new premises is that VOIP allows you to ‘port’ your number anywhere. If you have printed letterheads, business cards with the number your company has been using for years, then move into a different area code, there used to be no way of taking that number with you.
VOIP allows a user to port any number they owned at the old premises, and point this number to any line in the new premises. This can be managed in house and will enable the user to point the number at several different locations should they move to different areas, and can be an extremely useful disaster recovery tool, in the event of a fire or flood the company can instantly point the VOIP number to a disaster recovery site, ensuring your business is still contactable.
VOIP technology can also be used as a very effective way of allowing home workers to have full functionality of the IP telephone system whilst working remotely saving on office costs without compromise.
