VoIP is a modern form of business communication, and is helping thousands of businesses across the UK reduce their costs and move towards a more cloud based, digital telecoms environment.
What is a VoIP call?
A VoIP call is a telephone call made using your internet connection, rather than a traditional telephone line. VoIP stands for Voice Over IP, which is a fancy way of saying ‘internet telephone call’.
Using a VoIP telephone system, you can eliminate the need for multiple telephone lines, instead making better use of your businesses existing broadband connection for both calls and data traffic.
Before VoIP was common, your business had to have multiple telephone lines, each line supporting one call at any one time. By making use of VoIP calls, you make things simpler, easier and cheaper for your business.
How do VoIP calls work?
We know that the acronyms used in the telecoms industry are confusing—VoIP is no exception. But in reality, VoIP calls are a very simple and easy to understand premise. It takes your businesses broadband connection, and send your call traffic through it, to the call recipient.
When you speak down a VoIP telephone, your voice is broken up into little slices of information known as packets. Think of these packets as envelopes containing your voice call. These packets are transmitted down your broadband connection, to be opened by the party at the other end of the call.
Pretty simple really.
Because VoIP calls use this method of ‘packet-switching’, they offer higher quality audio when compared to traditional non-VoIP calls. They’re also more flexible, as VoIP calls can be made using both broadband and 4G connections.
A common concern for businesses is that a VoIP connection is unreliable, but this is not the case.
Most modern businesses have an Internet connection more than capable of sustaining a high-quality VoIP call. Businesses using fibre optic broadband (also known as FTTC) typically have an internet connection capable of supporting multiple, simultaneous VoIP call.
When you switch to VoIP, your voice calls are given priority through your internet connection. This prevents dropouts and quality issues.
What are the Benefits of VoIP calls?
Many businesses are making the move to VoIP, as it offers great benefits over traditional telephone calls, these include:
1. Reduced line costs
We touched on this before, but with VoIP, you don’t need multiple telephone lines—just your broadband connection. As you might expect, fewer lines = fewer costs.
2. No call charges
Because a VoIP call travels through your broadband connection, you can wave goodbye to monthly call charges. Our VoIP telephone systems offer each users 5,000 Free UK minutes, so you don’t have a costly monthly call bill.
3. Higher quality voice calls
VoIP calls are higher quality than their analogue counterpart. Using your internet connection for VoIP calls, allows for lower latency and high definition voice calling.
4. Future proof
Switching to VoIP makes your telephony future-proof. In 2025, the UK’s ISDN network is being switched off. This means that any business not using VoIP will be in jeopardy of losing their communications. While we have a few years yet—it is still something to consider.
In summary, VoIP is a great way to save your business money, and move towards a more future proof, robust telecoms environment. For more information about our VoIP telephone systems, email sales@bytesdigital.co.uk or give us a call on 03331 301 021.
