As businesses look to move to more digital, cloud-based workflows, VoIP has become the UK leader in modern business communication.
With lots of business across the UK looking to make the move to VoIP, it’s important to understand what a VoIP phone system is and how it works.
What is a VoIP Phone System?
A VoIP phone system is a piece of technology that controls your businesses incoming and outgoing calls. VoIP phone systems are cloud-based and require little to no on-site hardware at your premises.
VoIP stands for voice over IP. VoIP is the new, modern standard for making and receiving telephone calls using your broadband connection, rather than a dedicated telephone line.
This means that a VoIP telephone system doesn’t need multiple telephone lines and costly, on-site hardware to function—all that’s required is a broadband connection.
As you can see from our diagram, a VoIP telephone system uses your businesses existing broadband connection, along with our cloud platform to provide you with your business with robust voice connectivity.
By utilising a cloud-based VoIP telephone system, your business can streamline communications and provide a great platform for all your employees to connect to colleagues, customers and prospects.
How does a VoIP phone system work?
VoIP phone systems, at heart, are actually a very simple premise. They take your businesses incoming calls, route them to where they need to go, and then continue to support that call until either party hangs up the phone.
As a matter of fact, a VoIP phone system is very similar to a an on-premise, PBX telephone system. The only real difference is that VoIP uses more modern, IP connectivity; whereas PBXs use old ISDN technology.
Why should you upgrade to VoIP?
There are so many reasons why a business would want to upgrade to VoIP, but here’s our top three:
Cost reduction
It goes without saying that costs are a majorly important factor for businesses, and you may be concerned that upgrading to a newer technology will be costly. But that is not the case with VoIP. VoIP telephone systems can reduce your businesses running costs by up to 90% when compared to traditional PBX telephone systems.
Feature rich
Another concern is that a VoIP telephone system doesn’t have as many features as it’s PBX counterpart. But this is simply not true. VoIP telephone systems offer a huge range of features, with things like; auto-attendant, hunt groups, voicemail to email, call centre applications, desktop and mobile apps, on-hold music and promotions and more.
Future proof
In 2025, the UK switches off its ISDN network. This means that traditional, non-IP telephone systems will become obsolete. With more and more businesses across the UK making the move to VoIP, now is a great time as it helps ensure that your communications are ready for the ISDN switch off.
As more and more businesses move over to cloud-based VoIP telephone systems, it may be a viable option for your next communications platform.
