| Your business relies on its communications | | | | your staff are prepared for it. |
| infrastructure to make everything work. Without the | | | | The second advantage is that IP packets travel over |
| ability to place or receive calls, your business | | | | the Internet. By use of virtual private networking and |
| capabilities are greatly hampered, and reliability has | | | | other secure protocols, your telephone exchange |
| been the major touch stone for telephony service | | | | system can treat offices in Cardiff and Glasgow as if |
| for the last century or so. | | | | they were in the same building, while also avoiding |
| With reliability comes cost - maintaining old style land | | | | expensive tolls. |
| lines, and then inter office telephone exchange | | | | In terms of management and features, once your |
| systems represents a significant amount of hardware | | | | telephone calls run over an IP based system, |
| infrastructure and expense, and as anyone who's had | | | | monitoring telephone usage, recording calls on your |
| to upgrade a legacy phone exchange can tell you, | | | | network, and advanced voice mail functions have an |
| sometimes, those old standards are difficult or even | | | | implementation cost that's negligible. You can even |
| impossible to maintain. | | | | arrange for telephone call forwarding to desks or to |
| IP telephony (where all voice calls are broken down | | | | mobile phones for remote users with these systems, |
| into packets and sent through the phone system as | | | | and arrange for digital storage and transmission of |
| a digital data stream) has been around since the | | | | voice mail messages. On top of this, voice mail |
| 1990s. Indeed, most mobile phones are actually IP | | | | messages can be forwarded on to email inboxes, or |
| telephony devices, and as data compression | | | | arrange to have an email message sent when a voice |
| improves, more will make the switch. From a business | | | | mail is listened to as a confirmation of receipt. |
| standpoint, IP telephony offers a number of | | | | The roll out of IP telephony has greatly changed the |
| significant advantages, in both features and ease of | | | | underlying infrastructure of how businesses |
| management, while also reducing costs. | | | | communicate, and have done so fairly seamlessly. |
| The first advantage is that the old method of running | | | | Most of your users, if you switch to an IP telephony |
| cables to a dedicated PBX exchange has been | | | | solution, will barely notice the change, other than |
| replaced with using your existing network wiring to | | | | swapping out the phone on their desk (maybe) and |
| connect the telephones to a blade server in your | | | | perhaps adding some additional features they weren't |
| server room. This allows upgrading the number of | | | | used to. |
| phone lines in the office to be as simple as adding | | | | If you're looking for a way to trim infrastructure |
| another blade to the rack mount, putting phones on | | | | costs, and improve the bottom line of your business, |
| the desks, assigning them IP addresses and updating | | | | IP telephony may be an excellent way to do so, |
| the extension table. Where rolling out an extra | | | | particularly if you have to coordinate remote offices |
| hundred telephones in a building used to be a two | | | | and pay tolls for calls, or have need of a more robust |
| week process, it can now be done in an afternoon if | | | | answering system and voice mail solution. |