The use of the Internet for telephone communications is a mature alternative to using standard phone lines for businesses. First and foremost, it's a lot less expensive to operate this type of switch than using conventional lines through a conventional switch.

For example, it costs about $300-350 a month ($3,600-$4,200) for five standard phone lines with AT&T. Each line is connected to your conventional switch in your phone closet, and extension cables are installed from the switch to each office phone to provide phone and intercom service to each desktop’s commercial telephone handset.

A similar phone line capability can be accomplished through the Internet broadband connection you have using a single “trunk” or connection to the “VOIP phone company” which will allow you to have as many phone numbers that you want for inbound and/or outbound calls.  They are called DIDs or Direct In Dials, and VOIP means Voice Over IP. IP is the language used by the internet to let you surf.

The cost for this type of multiline service is about $8 a month for unlimited inbound calls for up to two simultaneous inbound calls, or $1.49 a month per line plus 1.2 cents per minute for unlimited simultaneous inbound calls. For very small companies, if you only expect up to two inbound calls at once, the flat rate is better than the metered call plan. You can move (port) your existing number(s) or get new one(s).

Under this scenario you would use a portion of your broadband Internet connection to service phone calls, including local, long distance and toll free calls if you need 800 number service. Inbound calls are free as stated above, but outbound, in the lower 48 states, are 1.44 cents per minute. If you use a 2,000 minutes (33 hours) of OUTBOUND calls a month from your office, your outbound call cost will be approximately $30. If you tend to receive calls more than make them, the monthly costs will be a lot lower. So your total annual savings will be huge compared to BellSouth/AT&T, breaking even after a few months of service.

Depending on your carrier and experience, your commercial Internet connection is $100-$150 a month, plus an Ethernet switch to provide Internet and phone service to the desktop. The phone "lines" are actually your existing data cables installed to your PCs. The Internet/data cable is connected to your telephone, and from the phone to your PC.  So it sits in the middle of the data cable. If you order a DSL business Internet line it is called a Dry Loop, without phone lines attached.

In either instance you need to buy VOIP phone handsets (we recommend the Aastra 57i), and a PBX switch to allow for commercial applications. The phones are approximately $275 each, including programming. The phone switch, a specialized PC running Linux and the PBX application, $1,450 with basic installation. A support contract is available for very little. This will allow us remote access to the PBX to provide service, updates and programming remotely over the Internet.

There are a number of advantages of the Internet VOIP PBX switch, notably very low operating costs and many, many features. A few are -

1     Each call, in and outbound, can be recorded so that management can monitor or review each and every call if they need to.

2     Each person's office phone can be taken home, plugged in to their home broadband Internet connection and connect to the PBX switch. This means that employees can work from home and receive calls, make calls and so on and still appear to be "at the office." This is a perfect solution to gasoline, road blockage, inclement weather issues and so on if the home Internet service does not block this type of communications.

3     Voice mail messages can be retrieved via phone, be automatically sent to an email account for each user, and even by logging in from anywhere from a PC and reviewing voice mail using a browser and a PCs speakers.

4     You can have unlimited IVRs. IVR are automated attendant messages so that you can have different messages (day/night/holiday/special offer as examples), and/or multiple messages if you service a variety of businesses under one roof. You will need more DIDs if you want a different number to each have a different message. You’ll be amazed.

Call or email us for details.