Cost – Hosted VoIP allows you to pay a flat subscription rate that is all-encompassing. It covers equipment, IT support and any maintenance you may need for your business phone system’s upkeep. You will never run into any surprises when it comes to pricing. With an on-premise PBX, business owners won’t have to deal with recurring payments, but they do need to take into account a higher set-up cost, hardware expenses and ongoing maintenance and operational fees.   

Mobility – With hosted PBX, you can access your business phone system and enjoy all the features it has to offer from any phone, anywhere, as long as you are connected to the Internet. This is an invaluable asset for smaller businesses where telecommuting is the norm. A hardware-based PBX, on the other hand, can be limiting since employees must use phones that are wired directly to the PBX inside an office environment.

Maintenance – If you don’t want to worry about having to hire an in-house IT team with the right skills, hosted PBX is the option for you. Support is available 24/7, eliminating the risk or responsibility of keeping your phone system up and running. An on-site VoIP system might be a better solution for larger enterprises since they have the IT capacity to support the installation and maintenance.

There are benefits and drawbacks with each approach, but ultimately, it comes down to your corporate priorities and your own personal preference. Hosted VoIP is an ideal choice for small and mid-sized business owners seeking cost-efficiency, mobility and round-the-clock support.

Still undecided as to whether or not you’re ready to jump on the bandwagon with VoIP? Consider the following benefits:

Aside from saving your business money in startup costs and monthly maintenance costs, the benefits include a variety of added features that a traditional phone system simply cannot offer. A few of these benefits include professional greetings, music on hold, custom auto-attendant, fax with no fax machine, ACD queuing, call recording, conferencing, and more – the list is never-ending.

Users are able to access VoIP anywhere they go as long as they have access to internet connection. This is ideal for businesses with employees who travel often or work from home. VoIP can also help increase productivity among employees with integrated mailboxes and real-time videoing. Aside from lower setup and maintenance costs, businesses will see infrastructure costs reduced as well as lower facility costs without such a large number of wires running through the office.

A great VoIP provider will offer a plan that fits your budget and needs, while still offering the same great features that attracted you to VoIP in the first place. However, before jumping on the bandwagon, it’s important to test your network to make sure it’s up for the task of handling VoIP. You can easily do this with a VoIP test, which will measure bandwidth, latency, and jitter, and check on the port status of your network.

Once deemed technology of the future, VoIP has since become a reality and continues to aid businesses in saving money and increasing efficiency.

A Chinese travel agency called CTrip tested the theory by recruiting 500 employees and asking half to work from home, while the rest reported to the office. In addition to a 13 percent performance increase, those working from home took fewer breaks and sick days, answered more calls per minute and reported improved work satisfaction.

So how do you make working from home a seamless process? A VoIP phone system allows telecommuters to harness all the capabilities of a corporate phone system from the comfort of their homes or even while on the road. You can dial from your office’s phone line, have calls transferred, access your voicemail, and conference call just as if it were a normal day in the office.  

A hosted phone service product like Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere is an ideal tool for small businesses with a large number of telecommuters. This technology permits remote or mobile workers to use their personal smartphones and computers as VoIP handsets with full business phone system functionality. You can use any standard SIP softphone to make or receive high-quality calls from any location, just as long as you have access to WiFi. It’s the perfect solution for cutting down on roaming costs during long distance business trips.

Working away from the office doesn’t have to mean feeling disconnected from your team members or business clients. With a VoIP phone system, you can stay linked to your network without missing a beat – even if you’re thousands of miles away.

Here are three critical factors to consider before switching to hosted VoIP:

Price point – Every small business is constantly looking to reduce operating expenses and improve its bottom line. But it’s important to find a service that offers value without sacrificing the features that a truly great business phone system should have. In addition to being much more affordable than setting up a traditional, on-site business phone system, a hosted VoIP system also minimizes the hassle of extensive maintenance costs. Plus, you have the freedom to upgrade your phone system whenever you choose without having to purchase more hardware or pay additional installation charges.

Telecommuting perks – Telecommuting is a new reality in today’s modern “workplace.” When business professionals are constantly on-the-go, they need flexible communications options in order to be productive. Hosted phone service products like Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere allow savvy entrepreneurs to transport their business phone systems and work extensions anywhere that is reachable by 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi networks through smartphones, laptops or tablets.

Reliability – In the end, the most important features of a phone system are call quality and system reliability. Although traditional PSTN phone networks have provided excellent quality, VoIP technology has come a long way since it was first introduced. Today’s VoIP service providers are able to deliver voice quality and unparalleled service for the fraction of the cost of hiring specialized IT staff. With the right choice of hosted PBX provider, the stress of dropped calls or lengthy downtime is virtually eliminated.

Though there are a multitude of options when choosing your business phone system, it is important to know exactly what works for your small business. Smart entrepreneurs, who look for the most cost-efficient, flexible service that offers excellent quality on a consistent level, will find those features and lots more in a hosted PBX VoIP solution. Your business has the potential to cultivate lasting relationships – all you need is the right communication tool.

Today’s technology allows the small business owner to move away from complicated, traditional PSTN phone systems to faster and more versatile PBX solutions. Besides being an easier-to-use service, the hosted PBX offers several other invaluable features.

- Lower entry points. High-end phone systems used to be the domain of big businesses. By outsourcing the infrastructure, a hosted PBX solution lowers the initial costs of setting up a business-grade phone system. This provides even the smallest business with world-class phone services that have previously been limited to FORTUNE 500 companies.

- Scalability. Traditional phone systems are generally bulky, cumbersome and inflexible. By switching to IP-PBX phone systems, growing small businesses can easily add more phone lines as they hire more employees. Some products, like Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere, will reduce the costs of expansion even further, providing free phones to their long-term users.

- Round-the-clock support. By using hosted services, small businesses outsource specialty IT departments to an outside firm. This allows entrepreneurs to lower their IT expenses and cut back on the operational costs of running their businesses. Hosted PBX solutions are also consistently monitored and serviced by experienced professionals who specialize in IP-PBX phone systems, allowing small business owners to concentrate on what they do best – providing excellent service to their customers.

A top priority for any small business is to shrink costs while providing better service to their customers. By reducing entry and service costs, while providing a low-cost way to scale service as the business grows, hosted PBX phone solutions even out the network services playing field and allow small businesses a chance to succeed alongside large enterprises. They offer a smart choice for any business looking to improve its customer service without breaking the bank.

By shifting to a hosted VoIP solution, businesses are able to provide an extra perk for employees who wish to work from home office locations or any other location that supports a broadband connection, instead of a traditional workplace. Businesses that offer telecommuting as an option can attract top talent to help them grow and expand.

Moving away from a traditional PSTN network also allows small businesses to easily and inexpensively scale their phone services as their size increases and new lines must be added to accommodate extra employees. An on-site PSTN infrastructure is notoriously expensive to maintain and expand. By replacing it with a hosted solution, both the upfront infrastructure costs and ongoing IT costs are marginalized and sometimes eliminated altogether. Hosted VoIP providers take on the expenses of scaling their customers’ phone networks since the databanks and supporting infrastructure are located at their facilities rather than by the end user.

Modern VoIP providers are able to provide telecommuting options through a range of services, most notably softphone applications, which allow smartphones or computers to function as natural VoIP extensions of business phone systems. Through the use of softphones, small businesses are able to provide telecommuting options to employees who wish to take advantage of working from home, as well as providing flexibility and across-the-board savings to their office phone networks. If these features are attractive to your small business, consider a hosted VoIP solution today.

Today’s modern small business uses a variety of technology and requires substantial IT support. By shifting to hosted phone service providers, small businesses can limit the network equipment managed at their on-site location and allow their overall IT budgets to shrink. Hosted VoIP networks eliminate the need for on-site phone servers and shift the burden of maintenance onto their service provider rather than the end user. Entrepreneurs can then concern themselves with running their small business, secure in the knowledge that professionals from their service provider are ensuring that their communications remain secure and reliable.

Another benefit of hosted services is the safety afforded to phone networks as part of business continuity and disaster recovery plans. By having phone networks hosted in a different location, businesses that are affected by disaster situations are able to maintain free and open lines of communication to ensure that their customers, partners and agents remain connected and available. This diminishes downtime and allows businesses to quickly bounce back from otherwise crippling crisis situations.

Hosted services also provide greater mobility than legacy systems. Softphone apps available from many of today’s hosted VoIP providers allow any smartphone or laptop to be turned into a business phone extension. These apps provide mobility for businesses that require their employees to work off-site and allow the flexibility that is desired by many of today’s top talent. Modern softphones make it possible for entrepreneurs to have their business extension available anywhere that is reachable by Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G networks.

When it comes to phone services, hosted VoIP networks provide small businesses with the versatility, features and price-points that traditional PSTN providers cannot offer. They offer an intelligent alternative for comprehensive disaster recovery plans and a flexible option for employees working from home or on business trips. These features, coupled with the hosted VoIP system’s ease-of-use, make them the right decision for small business owners everywhere.

Here are several things to keep in mind when inspecting your system for hosted VoIP capability.

• Bandwidth:  Every data network will have a speed with which data is transferred. Hosted VoIP products like Virtual PBX Complete with VoIP Anywhere require an allocation of 80 – 100 KBPS of bandwidth per active phone. This number is in addition to the regular bandwidth use for email, messaging and Web surfing. It is important to know what your network bandwidth is to ensure uninterrupted service and prevent lost signals or data.

• Packet Loss and Jitter: When voice data travels through the network, it is compressed into packets. If these packets are degraded or lost, the quality of the transmission – the voice you hear on the other side – is degraded. The higher the traffic, the more likely that some bits of data will fail to reach their destination. Usually, a packet loss of 0.1 percent is acceptable, but any higher rates need to be addressed by your system administrator. Jitter is the delay between the arrivals of these packets. Too much jitter and voice quality suffers.

• Latency: The length of time between a person speaking into a phone handset and that message reaching the ear of the listener is called Latency. Although some delay is understandable, delays higher than 50 milliseconds reduce voice quality, making the speaker sound garbled and unclear.

Low bandwidth coupled with high packet loss, jitter and latency will degrade a hosted VoIP network, rendering it unusable. To prevent this, popular VoIP service providers offer comprehensive VoIP Tests to help gauge capability of their users’ networks and provide recommendations to optimize their system to better handle hosted VoIP services. Although most business networks are able to handle hosted VoIP, savvy small business owners are encouraged to confirm their system capacity ahead of adoption to ensure uninterrupted data flow and high-quality voice service.

Most small business entrepreneurs probably use or have used softphones at some point – and just didn’t know it.

A softphone is a program (or app) that allows its’ user to make telephone calls over the internet. Some softphone systems have special headsets, but generally, the service requires a regular computer and audio system – speakers and a microphone, to function. Modern softphone applications also exist for smartphones and other mobile devices. Put simply, it makes the whole phone system virtual, without any wires or handsets to worry about.

There are also several other features that make softphones a great choice for small businesses, which include:

-          Flexibility: By not relying on any hardware, softphones can work in conjunction with an already existing VoIP PBX system. Integration with the pre-existing network allows smooth service and minimal downtime for business owners who need to shift offices or continue working from home.

-          Cost-efficiency: With a softphone, customers are no longer reliant on traditional phone service providers and are thusly spared the expenses of running a separate business Private Branch Exchange (PBX) network.  By relying on VoIP technology, all they need is a stable internet connection to maintain contact with their customers.

-          Portability: A business VoIP softphone allows entrepreneurs who often commute to use their desk phone outside the office. It is designed to allow full access to all the features of their work phone from their laptop or smartphone. Since there’s no physical device, their office space is less cluttered as well.

Regardless of whether you’re aligning it with your business VoIP PBX solution, using it in place of your regular phone or as a supplement to your smartphone, a softphone is a smart idea for small businesses looking to cut down on their bills, unclutter their workplace, or have their employees telecommute . If your small business can benefit from these changes, consider a softphone solution today.

Now, Virtual PBX customers can use 3-way calling to connect a third person to an existing two-way call.

3-way calling can enhance many aspects of your business, acting as an intermediary in any situation.  Examples: connecting a supplier to a customer while you control the discussion, bridging between managers of different departments or easily bringing in another person to give a different perspective, or validate anything that was said. This feature is truly invaluable.

Here’s how it works:

When you’re on a call on one of our VoIP phones, select the Conference option to put that call on hold. When you hear the dial tone, simply dial the other party, and press Conference again to connect the two parties. 

We welcome you to review the extensive features and advanced plans offered by Virtual PBX.

Also feel free to leave a comment explaining how you best use 3-way calling to improve your business, or share this blog with your favorite social networks like Facebook and Twitter. To learn more about Virtual PBX call us at 888-825-0800.