VoIP-Point

Voice Over IP Service Providers

One of the most important parts of your VoIP system may be your VoIP Service Provider. There are already many to choose from and the options are increasing all the time. Much like Broadband suppliers, VoIP Service Providers are not all equal.

VoIP Providers for Home users.

A home user would most likely want a VoIP provider to offer ‘call completion’ from the internet to traditional land lines and vice-versa. This would allow the home VoIP user to make a call from their IP telephone via their broadband link to another phone on the landline network. The thing to look for in the VoIP provider is their charges for placing these calls. Many offer low calling costs to the same country that the user resides in and offer an incremental scale for international calls. As usual, calls to mobiles are generally more expensive than those to land-lines. Some VoIP providers also offer free calling to landlines in the users country.

Another part of the service to be considered is whether you will get a POTS land-line number. This number allows people to call you from traditional land-line telephones by dialling a normal phone number. The call is then connected by the VoIP service provider to via your broadband connection to your IP telephone. The numbers offered usually relate to the user’s country, they may be geographic local numbers or national numbers. Geographic local numbers can usually be selected so that your family and friends can call you cheaply. National numbers are often low-premium rate numbers which cost marginally more to call to than their geographic counterparts. The premium element of these numbers provides extra revenue for the VoIP service provider.

Domestic VoIP providers also often bundle hardware with their service which may or may not be mandatory to use. For instance some VoIP providers give you ATAs which are configured specifically for their network and you may not be able to use any third-party hardware such as Hardware IP telephones or IP PBXs. Other VoIP providers may provide no hardware or software and expect you to either purchase equipment from them separately or provide your own. This often allows for a much greater scope in the type of VoIP system you can build at home.

VoIP Providers for Business Users

VoIP providers for business often offer a slightly different set of products to the customer. While ‘business’ oriented packages are available which closely resemble those offered to the Home user, many VoIP providers now offer extended features for business users.

One sought-after feature is the ‘Virtual’ or ‘Hosted’ PBX. Instead of the customer buying and installing PBX hardware at their site, the VoIP provider ‘hosts’ the PBX at their datacentre. This means that all incoming lines connect first at the provider’s datacentre before being routed via the internet to the customers premises. Likewise, outgoing calls connect from the customer via their broadband internet connection to the providers datacentre to pick up a line and call out. This means the the customer no longer has to have dedicated telephone lines at their premises, the only requirement being the broadband connection. Multiple outgoing and incoming lines can be carried via the broadband connection, the limitation usually being the upstream speed provided by the broadband supplier.

Other services provided to business users may include using VoIP to connect geographically seperate customer sites in a PBX fashion so that a free call can be placed from one office to another simply by picking up a phone and dialling an extension number. The option to divert calls between extensions can be made seemless so that a caller can be transferred from one geographically separate office to another without having to redial. Advanced voice-mail and call-waiting services can be provided, often at the Hosted PBX so that if all lines are busy, the caller will either be forwarded to a voicemail box or placed in a holding que with optional hold music.