VoIP

What is VoIP?

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What is VoIP

What is VoIP? The following definitions and questions were reprinted from the FCC website    IP-Enabled Services Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), is a technology that allows you to make voice calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a regular (or analog) phone line. Some VoIP services may only allow you to call other … Read more

In the Event of Emergency: Dial V-o-I-P for VoIP

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As word of the storm’s approach drew and concerns mounted in the Florida Keys and mainland Florida, Zoom Tan knew that they couldn’t remain idle. In the worst-case scenario, evacuation orders would be issued, and Zoom Tan’s office headquarters based in Naples, Florida would sustain damage, finding itself without power for who knows how long. They couldn’t leave things to chance. After all, Murphy’s Law tells us that if something can go wrong, it will. And, such was the case, when Hurricane Irma deprived millions of commercial businesses and residential homes of power, with its torrential rain and wind gusts more than 80 mph.

Call Routing Rescue for Business

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Hold Message Hell cartoon

Call routing for your business is critical to retaining happy customers and doing it the right way increases your satisfaction ratings. What could possibly be worse than getting stuck in Answering Machine Hell when you’re trying to call a business to secure a service or purchase a product? Well, the truth is, a fast busy … Read more

Legal Firms can get more from VoIP systems

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Legal Firms can get more from VoIP systems
Legal Firms Can Get More From VoIP SystemsModern VoIP systems are powerful communications tools. They help streamline workflows, improve client satisfaction and curb costs. In order to capitalize on the initial VoIP investment and get the most value possible, you must know your voip systems capabilities and understand how to use its tools properly. Most professionals focus keenly on their field with little or no thought about communications tools they use every day. Key features are often overlooked and sometimes making the time commitment for training isn’t seen as important as it should be.

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DLS Helps Best, Vanderlaan & Harrington Maintain a Commitment to Their Clients

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This renowned law firm in Chicago needed a communications system that offered reliability, helped manage costs and offered easy administration to help them get the most value from their solution. Best, Vanderlaan & Harrington is a firm of trial attorneys with a reputation for excellence and dedication to their clients. Their partners rank among the … Read more

The VoIP Market’s Gotten a Lot Tougher for the Little Guy (Pt 2)

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In many ways, VoIP regulations and taxes favor larger corporations, in both financial and structural ways.

The Price Competition Factor- Who Pays the Bill?

As VoIP services find themselves increasingly taxed at the State and Federal level, there’s a big question of who, exactly, will pay for these taxes, and how these tax increases will affect competition between large providers and small providers.

Generally speaking, large providers almost always have a price advantage over small providers. That isn’t to say large providers offer a greater value than small providers, but it is to say their economies of scale almost always ensure they can sell their services for less than their smaller competition.

This gives larger providers a distinct market advantage over smaller providers as taxes on VoIP increase. Larger providers are going to be better able to pass these taxes directly on to their customers instead of paying them out of pocket. Often they’ll be able to do so while still offering cheaper services than smaller providers.

Smaller providers face a bigger question as taxes rise- should they make their customers pay these taxes, raising their rates? Or should they pay these taxes themselves, sacrificing some of their already slim margins in order to continue to serve their customers at the same price point those customers are accustomed to?

Once again- let’s reiterate that we aren’t talking about value here, that we’re only talking about price. When it comes to price, larger providers almost always have leverage over smaller providers, which means these increased tax burdens have hurt smaller providers far more than their larger competition.

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Can Your IT Department Handle the Switch to VoIP on Their Own? (Pt 2)

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While the desire to physically own and control the technology utilized in your organization’s telephony system is understandable it isn’t particularly easy to dismantle. The fact of the matter is it’s better to focus your organization’s space, resources and attention on the work your employees perform and not on optimizing and maintaining the infrastructure that keeps the lights on and the phone lines open.

Selective Outsourcing?

Think about all the elements of your organization’s infrastructure, all those elements existing purely to facilitate the production of the products and services your organization runs, and ask yourself if you would really want to be personally responsible for all of them, or whether you’re comfortable having someone else, a specialist group, take care of the “care and feeding” of those systems. It won’t take more than a minute of internal inquiry to realize the more infrastructure operations you can outsource the better- and that includes the infrastructure of your organization’s telephony system.

Yet just because you can easily discount the necessity of physically hosting your organization’s VoIP gear that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to write off the human element quite so easily. That is to say, even though you won’t think twice about sending the physical equipment running your phone systems to a remote location, you’ll probably have a difficult time taking the responsibility of running those systems out of your IT department’s hands.

We admit- the human element of switching to any new technology can be tricky to handle, especially if it involves downsizing within your organization or otherwise making one or more members of your IT department redundant.

There are a couple of different ways to approach this dilemma.

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Can Your IT Department Handle the Switch to VoIP on Their Own? (Pt 1)

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One of the benefits of switching to VoIP telephony solution is the organizational flexibility it provides you. Now, “organizational flexibility” can mean a lot of things, especially when it comes to current generation telephony technology. Organization flexibility can refer to the fact VoIP telephony provides you with a considerably easier time changing the size and scope of your organization, increasing its scalability dramatically compared with traditional telephony solutions. Yet it also hints at the fact that VoIP can help you restructure the way your organization works, including what staff you require and what systems can be handled by outside parties. Is your IT staff ready to finally switch to VoIP?

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Will there be 1 Billion Mobile VoIP Users by 2017?

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A report released at the end of 2012 seemed to point towards a very promising future for mobile VoIP, which is, roughly speaking, nothing more than VoIP services run on smartphones and tablets through apps like the one offered by Skype or Google Voice. The report was released by Juniper Research and it projected the mobile VoIP world would chalk up 1 billion total subscribers by 2017. This is a bold projection, one that seems to indicate VoIP is the future of mobile telephony, but many experts read the report and asked a simple question- “How many of those users will actually generate revenue for mobile VoIP provider?”

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