Looking to upgrade your phone system can be a daunting task. With so many different options on the market, it can be hard to find the right one for your business.
One of the options that lots of businesses are moving to is a VoIP phone system. If you’ve researched it, you may already be aware of VoIP phone systems and what they do.
In this feature, I’ll explain exactly what you’ll need to setup your own VoIP phone system, and give you an insight into how they work.
What do you need to setup a VoIP phone system?
There are three pieces of equipment that you’ll need to setup a VoIP phone system for your business, which are:
- Broadband router - acting as a gateway for voice traffic
- Broadband connection - allowing voice traffic to travel to its destination
- VoIP phone - to make and receive calls
Sounds simple? That’s because it is. VoIP is a very simple, easy phone system to set up. As a matter of fact, it’s essentially plug and play.
Because VoIP uses the cloud to host your phone system (rather than a physical box on the wall), it doesn’t need long, costly installations and lots of expensive hardware.
But I’ll explain each piece of hardware you’ll need in a bit more depth, so you can get a feel for what each piece of equipment actually does and how they all interact with each other.
Broadband router
Chances are, your business already has a broadband router set up in your premises. Just like a home broadband router, an office router provides a WiFi connection to all of the devices in your business. This is the ‘gateway’ that allows VoIP traffic to pass through and onto the wide world.
Broadband connection
Because VoIP uses the internet to transmit calls and voice traffic, you don’t need multiple, costly telephone lines. Instead, your voice traffic just runs along your existing broadband connection. This is one of VoIP’s largest cost saving benefits as it helps businesses reduce (if not totally remove) call charges and line rental costs.
VoIP Phone
Naturally, a VoIP phone system does require a phone to go on the end of it. The phone must be ‘VoIP-ready’. These VoIP phones connect to your system using either a WiFi connection or CaT5 cables. But even if you don’t have VoIP phones, there’s no need to worry. We offer free VoIP phones with our professional licence.
How does a VoIP phone system work once it’s set up?
As you can imagine, VoIP phone systems are a lot simpler than their on-premise counterpart. Just by looking at the hardware that you need to setup a VoIP phone system, you can see that it’s a considerably less complicated, more straightforward process than setting up a new on-premise solution.
The diagram above shows you how a VoIP phone system works, giving you an idea of what you’re getting when you choose to move to VoIP. It’s simple and easy.
But just in case, here’s a brief explanation:
You make a call, which then travels from your handset to your broadband router via WiFi or cabling (whichever you’ve opted for).
From here, the VoIP call travels through the router and into our cloud phone platform. This platform points the call to it’s destination (ie. the person you’re calling). The call then travels to the UK’s PSTN (telephone network) and is connected to the other party.
Why should I move to VoIP?
There are many great reasons why your business would want to move to VoIP. Although we’ve already talked about how easy it is to setup a new VoIP telephone system, this is not the only benefit of moving to VoIP.
When compared to traditional on-premise telephone systems, a VoIP phone system has some clear benefits.
As you can see, comparing the two really leaves on-premise systems in dust. While on-premise telephone systems have had their place in the market for a while now, more and more businesses are choosing to make the move to cloud based VoIP phone systems.
