A hosted telecoms solution is fantastic for small businesses that need flexibility
If you’re a small business, particularly if you’re a new startup, it would seem to be a very large investment to purchase a new telephone system for your company, however, with a hosted telecoms solution you can have a fully professional system without the large capital outlay.
Hosted, or cloud-based, phone systems usually consist of a telephone handset located in your office which connects via an internet connection to a PBX or main processing unit based in a large remote data centre somewhere. These kind of services are usually subscription based, so you pay on a per-user per month basis.
For a small business a hosted system can be ideal, because it gives you big telephone system features but without a big upfront cost. As your business grows you can simply add more users, and likewise if you need to downsize you can reduce users to save costs. Changes are normally done via a web control panel and are instantaneous, so you can quickly change settings whenever you need to.
There are a number of things you need to consider when running a hosted telephone system, the first and foremost is the speed of your internet connection. If your internet connection isn’t fast enough then you will get poor quality and broken-up calls. For most businesses this would involve using Fibre Optic Broadband, or a Dedicated Leased Line connection. If you are in an area where the internet speeds aren’t very fast, then its best to use a completely separate internet connection from your computers, so you would have one purely for your phones and one for your computers. This helps because it means anything your computers are doing, such as downloading files or streaming data, should not affect your phone calls at all. Unfortunately this is the area where many providers and business owners don’t consider when first setting up, and then they often get a bad experience of VoIP technology because network congestion causes them to experience poor quality phone calls.
Most hosted telephone systems are flexible, so you can choose the best solution which fits your business needs – because hosted systems are subscription based, you can change to another system completely if your current one doesn’t suit your requirements, and financially you have kept your costs down as there are no up-front capital expenditures!
For more information on hosted telephone systems, please get in touch on 0161 711 1100