VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)

VoIP has the potential to offer a raft of benefits for growing businesses, but is now the time to invest in the technology?

It’s a tempting prospect for any growing business. With Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), you can make long distance and international telephone calls for the price of local ones, pay nothing for calls between business sites and listen to your emails over the phone.

So how does the technology work? VoIP (also know as internet telephony) enables voice calls to be sent over a broadband internet connection. The voice data is compressed and sent over packet-based data networks (i.e. the internet), rather than using that of traditional telephones, which means it uses up to 90% less bandwidth than a traditional phone call.

The technology has been around for a decade but 2005 marked a turning point in its fortunes. Alongside telecom providers, companies such as Microsoft, search engine Google and auction house eBay (through its takeover of Skype) have all recently invested millions of pounds in internet telephony services. So should your business be sitting up and taking notice?

The real savings associated with VoIP are call charges, particularly on international ones, where you can typically make savings of up to 80%. You will only be paying to connect to the internet so can avoid charges you would normally pay your telecoms provider.

All current features associated with traditional telephone systems, such as voicemail, conference calling and call forwarding are available in most VoIP systems. But the technology also provides useful features above and beyond those of traditional telephone systems. For example, you can read your voicemail on your computer screen and listen to your email through an IP enabled telephone.

An added attraction for growing businesses is that VoIP telephony offers a large degree of flexibility. You can add telephone lines and increase call capacity without the need to install additional cables. If you are expanding your business across different sites, VoIP will help you save on infrastructure and ongoing telephone costs, as calls between sites are treated as if dialling extension numbers.

“If you are setting up a new site or replacing an obsolete network within your organisation, there will almost certainly be a good business case for VoIP,” says Andy Moore, sales manager at BT Business.

And it’s ideal for businesses that carry out a large amount of work on the move, or need to support remote workers. If you have a mobile computing device such as a laptop or personal digital assistant (PDA), you can take calls wherever you are located.