VoiP and cell phones: Sorting out your phone bills
Once upon a time, before folks watched bad music videos on iPhones and most coffee shops could double as someone's office, a business might have been considered disreputable if it didn't have a landline telephone number and a fawning voice mail message.
Today, voice mail might be considered … well, rude. Like you're ignoring your cell phone and don't have the decency to answer e-mail on a Blackberry.
Because your customers own you.
Welcome to entrepreneurship. The price you pay for answering to no boss: answering to everyone else, all the time.
But you shouldn't pay more for that privilege than necessary. Structuring your Internet services and your phone system is a Business 101 exercise in resource management. Figuring this out will help you understand how your company works. And the problem-solving process here can apply to other parts of your business.
These days, the only good reason to have a phone in the office at all – landline, voice over Internet protocol or otherwise – is to cut down on the cost of a cell phone plan. It’s possible through companies like RingCentral to set up a virtual office phone system, complete with a forwarding system, toll-free numbers and voice mail, without even having a regular phone line installed. A small office with a handful of employees that only requires one line for business calls could conceivably offer a small cell phone stipend to each employee.
As an aside, here’s a crazy tip for folks who spend a lot of time working with the government or do international shipping – you need a fax machine. Amazing, we know. It’s 2009. But international shipping requires forms to be faxed all the time, and so do government agencies.
Costs
Phone costs per landline get cheaper as the number of lines grows. Three or four phones might cost $100 a month. But an office with 40 phone lines might cost $400 a month, if networked through a T1 line. A T1 line can cost from $350 to $1200 a month. It's possible to use a cable line, DSL or Verizon's newfangled fiberoptic FIOS service to do VoIP – each of which is much less expensive than a T1 line and can offer faster service. But none of these services tend to be able to guarantee uptime, so your phone lines could be down for hours at random intervals. And upload speeds for cable and DSL are much slower than a T1, so fewer phones can be supported.
Voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, can be much less expensive than a traditional landline, once the number of lines needed reaches a threshold. VoIP requires 64 kilobits per second for good call quality. A high-speed digital T1 line works at 1.5 Mbps – good for up to 24 telephone lines.
Cost distinguishes VoIP from plain old telephone service. But so does reliability and customer service. Skype is probably the best known VoIP service, offering free phone calls to other Skype users and costs of about $0.02 a minute domestically and to many overseas countries. But eBay's Skype unit famously has no phone number for customer service, despite its 300 million users and growing revenue. MagicJack appears to be selling 10,000 of its $40 VoIP devices every day, but is also taking customer service hits.
Voice over IP has appeal to small, cost-conscious businesses, but the largest technology providers seem to be ignoring this niche of the market. Microsoft took a shot at VoIP for small business when it launched a VoIP software package called Response Point in October of 2007. But Microsoft effectively killed the product earlier this year by putting it in “maintenance mode,” announcing it will have no more upgrades.
You're going to have to comparison shop to find the Internet service provider and VoIP provider that matches your needs for reliability and cost. We can help.
