Hosted VoIP is gradually becoming more widely accepted by many small to medium-sized businesses as an alternative to costly telephony infrastructures. As PBX systems increase in popularity so do the concerns that surround VoIP security. When your PBX is hosted, these concerns are addressed with the help of your VoIP service provider. If, however, you opt for a premise based solution, you are going to be very much on your own. Most “big box” carriers will do little to nothing to help you secure your IP PBX.
Hosted PBX
Hosted PBX Bundles
Hosted PBX services provide small to medium-sized businesses with a way to implement a Unified Communications system complete with all of the necessary features and capabilities for effective business communications. If your goal is to improve efficiency and reduce cost, you need to carefully assess your business needs and plan to ensure that you are not going to be implementing another system few years from now.
Depending upon the hosted PBX service provider you choose, system features and capabilities in addition to bundles and pricing will vary. If you are just beginning to research hosted PBX as an option for business telephony, this article will help you understand common practices of bundled hosted PBX pricing, the general restrictive nature of any type of service bundling, and how it can limit business choices.
How the Demand for Mobile VoIP Changes Business VoIP Market
The increased demand for mobile VoIP is changing the forecast for the global business VoIP market over the next six years. According to Global Industry Analysts Inc., a worldwide business strategy and market intelligence source, global business VoIP is being influenced by two factors which include the rapid acceptance of VoIP by businesses around the globe and the increased demand for mobile VoIP.
In terms of market segments, the fastest growing market is hosted PBX services. Additionally, the VoIP market on a global scale will be driven by the value and cost savings to companies around the world thanks to new unified communications technology. The hosted PBX market is expected to increase at a Compound Annual Growth Rate by more than twelve from 2012 to the year 2018.
SIP Trunking Explained
If you know very little about telecommunications but have some basic understanding of the Voice over IP technology – you will have no trouble grasping the concept of SIP trunking. Understanding why DLS chooses not to offer this service may take some explaining.
Understanding Trunking
The word “Trunk” has more than one meaning but in communications it came to represent a concept of a part that can be divided into branches and vice versa. More specifically, the term “trunk” is used to describe a transmission channel between two switching systems. Such transmission channel could be comprised of one or more communications circuits. When you think about public switched telephone network (PSTN), you imagine many different telephone switches all connected to each ot
her using trunks. Each trunk would typically consist of multiple trunk lines. Trunk sizes vary depending on how many trunk lines are in it.
Since the 1970s telecom services largely relied on the technology called TDM (Time Division Multiplexing). This technology allowed delivery of fixed number of voice channels per digital circuit. For example: T-1 circuit would contain 24 channels, PRI – 23 channels, etc. Each channel could be used for voice or data. This technology represented a significant leap from the analog switches because it allowed delivery of multiple channels over a 4-wire connection eliminating costly requirement for individual copper pairs to be run from the central office switch. A business could purchase a digital circuit(s) and pool some or all of its channels into trunk. These channels would then be referred to as “trunk lines”.
DLS Hosted PBX Fax Service: Signing and Notarizing Faxes Without Printing
DLS Hosted PBX Fax-to-Email service directs all the faxes to your email. Faxes are attached to email messages as image files in Adobe PDF format.
You may be accessing your email from a variety of devices be they personal computers, smartphones or tablets. Each of these devices can be used to add signatures to PDF documents with SignNow. All you need to do is create a free account, upload your document and follow a set of straightforward, easy-to-understand directions. SignNow offers free applications for iPhone OS and Android Smartphone platforms. Your phone’s touch screen can be used to quickly capture your signature. Alternatively, you can use desktop website www.SignNow.com to produce a signature without capturing it.
Do I need a VoIP Expert to Configure My PBX?
From my experience simply buying the latest-and-greatest PBX system does not always guarantee the benefit to a customer. It’s like getting a health club membership but not making a lifestyle change necessary to take advantage of your membership.
What I have been observing here, at DLS, time after time, is that even after making a decision to subscribe to our hosted PBX service, the first order of business for most clients is to imitate the way the old system worked.
This sounds like a great idea from the prospective lowering the incline of a learning curve and quelling the unrest of users who are less receptive to innovation (regardless of whether it’s good or bad for business). Unfortunately, many companies get stuck in that “transitional” configuration and never bother to move past it.
Can you greatly improve your customer’s satisfaction or employee efficiency by upgrading to a new phone system or hosted VoIP service? Absolutely! But if you don’t configure your new PBX properly then it could very well deliver mediocre results similar to those of a decade-old clunker you’ve been keeping together with duct-tape. Really, it is hard to unleash full ROI potential when your new PBX setup imitates the old one.
Another problem is that an unfortunate number of small business owners have no idea how to best configure or provision their new phone system setups even after spending a few days on administrator and user training sessions.
PBX Phones Review: GXV 3175
Grandstream’s entry into VoIP market resembles that of auto-makers Hyundai and Kia. They had entered VoIP arena with ultra-cheap GXP 2000 SIP phones. Having to deal with their earlier series I can certainly tell you that they were of questionable quality in both: software, hardware and technical support aspects. GXV3175 is a rather ambitious attempt at a multimedia phone that supports video, Wi-Fi, POE (power over Ethernet), high definition voice and allows you to run applications.
VoIP SPAM as We Know It
VoIP technology has clear advantages over traditional circuit switched telephony. One of the most prominent advantages of Hosted VoIP is its relative affordability as call volume scales up. We call it “price-performance”. Unfortunately ethical and legal business operators are not the only ones to take advantage of this benefit. Accessibility of hosted VoIP resulted in lowering the cost of predictive dialing (technology allowing a PBX system to place many calls automatically).
This spam takes interactive and non-interactive forms. By interactive I mean any unsolicited robotic calls that let you talk to a live agent. Non-interactive spam is typically presented as message broadcasts (be they text, voice or email).
Anatomy of the PBX phone system
There are a lot of terms we use in the telephony world that most people don’t fully understand, even if they throw them about with abandon. This is not because those people are dumb or ignorant. Rather, it’s simply because the telephony world is filled with jargon and “alphabet soup” terminology that can make really simple systems seem much more complex than they actually are.
PBX vendors and hosted PBX service providers love to invent their own telephony language. But the truth is – the basic concepts of call switching are common regardless of whether your PBX phone system is hosted or resides on your premises and whether it uses analog, digital or latest VoIP technology. Clarifying these terms and removing the ambiguity surrounding their use is often all it takes to help owners and users understand the basics of phone systems operation.
With that in mind, let’s take a minute to clearly define some of the most commonly used terms in the world of telephony technology.
A Word About YOUR Call Recording Storage
Call recording storage is not something most providers often speak of. It is considered an inner working of their infrastructure and usually is not visible to the public eye. Yet it is important for YOU to know that your hosted system is provisioned to record and keep all the calls you want it to. One of the great benefits of switching your business telephony over to Hosted VoIP lies in just how easy hosted systems make call recording appear. In a hosted environment you don’t need to worry about hooking up dedicated call recording devices or converting physical audio files to bits and bytes after the fact. Hosted PBX systems let you automatically record and save a copy of every single call running through your organization’s communication channels without giving the process a second thought.
Well, that’s not really true. All those recorded calls must be mixed, encoded and then need to go somewhere. If your hosted VoIP service provider’s storage systems aren’t robust enough or you will never get to take advantage of the full benefits offered by persistent call recording. After all, the great benefit of persistent call recording lies within the ability to pull up calls made years ago with little more than the click of your mouse. And you can’t do that if you only have enough storage to hold on to calls made within the last six months.