Residential VoIP Services Used for Business

With the advent of VoIP (Voice over IP) service providers, you now have more choices than before. I provide a summary of the more popular inexpensive consumer-class VoIP providers. These providers should not be considered as business-class, in whom you could trust your whole service.

I consider these consumer-class providers as sources for an inexpensive local/long distance dialing solution, and not as a replacement for your current telephone service.

By connecting their VoIP service to your phone system, you can add an outbound only line to your phone system which will reduce your monthly phone bill, while maintaining the reliability of your primary telephone service.

The dial tone from the following providers can be wired (through an adapter) to a spare outside line port in your phone system. Since the adapter delivers an analog line, you can even add a VoIP line to your old school telephone
system.

Make the VoIP service your first choice for dialing long distance calls (either manually or through the phone system’s dial 9 feature). Should you lose the service (due to bandwidth errors or loss of the internet), simply use your regular phone lines for outbound calling.

Remember, to use a VoIP service, you do need Internet bandwidth (a DSL, cable modem, or T-1).

Skype

I am a big user of Skype at my home. My daughter is currently living in South Korea, and we use Skype to talk to each other. For $60 for the year, she is able to have a local telephone number with unlimited inbound and outbound calls. In order to use her Skype number, she must answer and originate calls at her PC, using a multimedia headset. There are adapters that plug into the PC’s USB port that will provide a telephone jack, for connecting a regular wired or cordless telephone, or for connecting to your phone system. You will need to have a computer set up with the Skype account, and it must always be on.

From personal experience, Skype service has been reliable and the voice quality is pretty good.

MagicJack

This is a service similar to Skype, where you need the Internet and a PC set up with your account information. MagicJack provides an adapter that provides a telephone jack. For $39.95 for the first year, and then $19.95 per year afterwards, you can make unlimited calls to the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

I have tried the MagicJack myself, and I could not get it to work. It took me days to finally reach a live person, and when I did they could not help me, only regurgitate what their web instructions said. I lost my patience and cancelled the order. I am aware of companies that are using this service, so perhaps my experience is atypical.

I recently read an interview with the founder of MagicJack, Dan Borislow. He noted that the customer service has improved dramatically since its introduction a year ago. He also said that the actual MagicJack USB device is on its third iteration of hardware improvements, eliminating some of the initial technical glitches. Since my original experience, I have found that the MagicJack device should really be plugged into a powered USB hub, as some PC’s will not deliver enough voltage for the MagicJack.

MagicJack expects to add new features in the near future.

Vonage

You have probably seen the television commercials — for $24.99 a month, you can have a local telephone number with unlimited dialing within the US. Unlike the Skype and MagicJack solution, you do not need to leave a PC on to provide the dial tone. Vonage ships you a box that connects to your local area network that is configured with your account info.

They also offer various plans, based upon your desired coverage.

Our customers that have used Vonage have complained about the poor customer service. In order to provide you with cheap service, just remember that good support does cost. Bottom line — you get what you pay for.

BCS has customers that use a competitor of Vonage for international calls. These companies make frequent calls to South America, and they have a dialing plan geared to inexpensive international calls.

Warning about VoIP

The quality of voice calls over the Internet is iffy, especially sensitive to upload and download speeds and network congestion. I have seen the voice quality of VoIP calls impacted when large files are being e-mailed or downloaded, or when someone in the local area network is streaming live audio/video. If the voice quality of your VoIP calls is often choppy or echo-ey, you may need to enforce an Internet usage policy on your staff, or perhaps implement quality of service within your local area network. However, be warned that once your call is in "the cloud," you have no control over your quality of service, and may still experience less than great audio.

Another warning — do not use your VoIP circuit for 911 emergency calls. Educate your staff to use the wired local telephone lines for emergencies. If you use the dial 9 feature in your phone system, make sure that 911 calls are routed over a local telephone line.

Additional ways to save on your phone bill – BCS real-life experience

If you are using a cable provider (Charter, Comcast) for your Internet access, you may be able to get a line with unlimited dialing for a discount. BCS actually switched our fax line to Charter and ran it through the phone system. The line is our first choice for long distance calls. This has saved us toll charges. And since most of our inbound fax traffic has migrated to e-mail, using the fax line for voice calls has not seriously affected our incoming fax capability.

In addition, we replaced our fax machine with a fax server. The fax server answers the inbound fax calls, captures the fax as a PDF file, and then e-mails it to our general delivery e-mail account. We now get to delete the faxes from "our travel department," health insurance solicitations, and urgent requests from the finance minister in Sonambia, instead of wasting toner and paper on these junk faxes. The main benefit is that we can save important faxes as files on our customer database server.

The fax server also allows us to fax from our desktops, so no more printing and then going to the fax machine. One final savings point — we no longer need to buy paper and toner for our fax machine. We only use our fax machine to send an outbound paper fax that does not already exist as a file on our server.

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