Telephony for the small business

Competition in the telephony market is fierce and no more so than in the small-business market with an ever growing and increasingly baffling array of products and services.

In this feature we look at what’s on offer and how to get the best from what you buy, whether it’s a traditional PBX, in-house Voice over IP (VoIP) system or hosted solution.

Oldies but goodies
The first thing to understand is that you don’t necessarily have to opt for the latest IP-based telephony products to get an up-to-date and workable solution. Sure, there are benefits to be had from going down the Voice over IP path (see 'Why VoIP?' later for a quick summary), but conventional telephone systems are still widely available and widely used.

Partly as a result of the introduction of IP-based alternatives, the cost of conventional equipment has fallen significantly in the past few years.

Another advantage with traditional PBX systems is their reliability; breakdowns are rare with little need for maintenance or day-to-day management. As a result, more than half of all new small-business phone systems are still based on old-fashioned circuit switched hardware, designed to work with standard dial-up and ISDN lines rather than the internet.

Another thing worth knowing is that there’s very little that VoIP can do which can’t be done with a conventional telephone system. Indeed IP-based solutions try hard to match what conventional systems provide in terms of call handling and other features, not the other way round.

In addition, VoIP does nothing to improve call quality or security - two of the biggest concerns with any solution that uses the internet to carry its traffic.

Lastly, the monopoly days of BT are long past, and now there are plenty of telecoms providers and calling plans to choose from to help drive down and stay on top of running costs. So for a lot of small businesses, it can be hard to justify moving to VoIP at all.

New lamps for old
There are benefits to ge gained from using VoIP technology, most centred on the ability to save on call costs although, equally, there are benefits in terms of extra flexibility and simpler management, especially in larger organisations.

However, you don’t have to rip out your old phone system and replace it with something new to reap these rewards. Rather you can simply use VoIP to link conventional telephone systems at different offices, enabling calls between those locations to be carried for free over the internet rather than having to rent an expensive leased line or pay dial-up charges.

Users in one office can also 'break out' and make calls over the public switched network (PSTN) via the PBX in another. A facility referred to as 'least cost routing' with the calls then charged at local rather than national or, possibly, international, rates.

Often referred to as VoIP gateways or long line extensions you may well find your existing PBX supplier offering this kind of add-on as an optional extra.

If not, there are lots of affordable third-party products, from companies such as Avaya, Cisco, Multi-Tech, Quintum and others, that simply plug into a free telephone extension on the PBX to provide these least cost routing options.

The full Monty
If you have several offices you want to link together big call savings can be achieved from a VoIP gateway.

However, if you want to support multiple teleworkers and/or reap the other benefits VoIP has to deliver then a PBX with native IP support will be needed.

Fortunately that still doesn’t, always, mean ditching everything you have. Indeed, most vendors offer hybrid products to support both traditional analogue/digital telephone handsets and IP users.

You can also get adapters to allow existing handsets to be plugged into the Lan and used with an IP-based exchange.