At first, people have been skeptical to use VoIP but soon found out the effectiveness and convenience of VoIP.
VoIP phones are now changing people’s perspective on the use of telephone. If you want a phone, it can be a good choice.
VoIP offers standard features that regular landline phones often charges extra. For instance, free or low cost long distance calls are often not available in regular landlines. This is because VoIP uses the internet to make a call. Since the internet offers free information, and fast communication, VoIP phones take advantage of this feature to transmit the calls free.
With a VoIP phone, you can take your personal number wherever you are. You can make and receive phone calls from your number even if you are traveling as long as there is an active internet connection to where you are going.
There are many VoIP broadband phone provider in the market today, choosing the right one would be very beneficial for your business or personal for your use.
Here are some of the things you should look for when choosing VoIP service providers:
Audio Quality
Recent advancement in technology allows better sound quality with reduced noise. This means that a VoIP service provider should have excellent audio quality when making calls. If you experience lags or delays in your phone calls, you should think twice before subscribing to the company another time.
Little or no delay transmission is needed for your voice to reach the person you are calling. A one-second delay can mean the difference of making a simple answer of “yes” or “no”. Remember that voice delays can mean misunderstanding, and precise answers are extremely important in businesses.
Reliability
Imagine making an important business deal or talking to your family and friends and your call is suddenly cut off. This is a bad sign that your service provider is not making sure that you get your money’s worth.
Get a VoIP service provider that offers maximum reliability and free try out periods to ensure you that they give the best service to their subscribers. Although cheap rates are attractive, try their services first before committing.
Customer Service
VoIP service providers should offer customer support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This can help you if you ever have problems using VoIP.
The customer assistance service should be quick and take care of their subscribers immediately after making the call. Know if the VoIP service providers you are planning on subscribing have customer assistance. Customer service can be found in the VoIP service providers or by calling them.
Features
VoIP service providers should offer standard features like; free long distance calls, emails, fax, web conferencing, and videophone and others for no extra fee at all. Still quite a few VoIP service providers out there charge for these extra features. Get a VoIP service provider that offers maximum standard features free.
Price
VoIP is supposed to be free or cheap. Get a VoIP service provider that offer free long distance and low monthly payments. Make sure that not only it should be cheap but also offers quality service. Most providers offer trial periods, use this to determine if it is worth spending you hard earned cash.
However convenient it might be to own a VoIP phone, there are still drawbacks for it. For example, you should have a high-speed internet connected.
Since VoIP phones depends on your internet connection, this means that disconnected internet, no VoIP service. Slow internet connection is also a factor. With slow internet connection, expect audio delays.
It is wise that before getting a VoIP phone, you should determine that the internet connection in your area is broadband and reliable.
Bob Hett has extensively covered the VoIP Service Provider industry as an analyst and has researched the various companies for factors based on price, reliability, support and overall quality. Learn more at VoIP Phones.
VOIP offers great benefits. It involves the setting up of just one network that will encompass so many functions at extremely affordable costs. Studies show that the phone bill can be culled to half or even lower.
Although cost savings is reason 1 for installing VoIP there are by other great advantages. In the case of small businesses, you can choose any area code irrespective of where you operate from. So, if most of your clients are in Atlanta but you are based in New York you can choose a connection with an Atlanta code. This enables you to create a sound business presence in many cities. The system allows setting up of toll-free lines which creates the image of a large business. If you choose a plan carefully you will be able to make unlimited free calls for a fixed payment, forward calls, call internationally for a very low charge, and expand the reach of your operation.
A VoIP system moves with you, erasing the problems associated with business travel or other kinds of moves like shifting office or home.
As a business person, you or you office staff will always know who called because of “unified messaging.” And the system collates all the messages such that you can prioritize responses. And, what is even more alluring is that business can retrieve messages via telephone, PC, laptop, or PDA. So, your customers receive 24/7 service and are never disappointed.
The VoIP system allows multiple employees to manage customer calls. Creates a “mini” call center expanding business potential and facilitates better utilization of scarce resources. This leads to immediate solutions for customers. Useful features are click-to-call, web based voice mail, integrated conferencing, auto-attendant capabilities, and call routing.
In case of corporate use, VoIP allows the use of a single high speed internet connection for all voice, video, and data communications. It permits convergence. By incorporating a single data network across all offices and employees the business can reduce operating costs, increase productivity and efficacy, and enhance communications and customer services.
What you need to do, is seek expert advice and find out all you can about quality,
infrastructure, costs, and advantages as well as disadvantages. Technology moves with time so keep in mind aspects like upgrading of system and maintenance.
The system introduces efficiency, effectiveness, professionalism, and a customer oriented approach to the smallest of businesses, lending the business the advantages of otherwise unattainable infrastructure.
Paul Wilson is a freelance writer for http://www.1866Voip.com , the premier website to find help on Voip including topics on online voip, voip phone, voip service providers, voip solutions, business voip, internet telephony voip and more.
A long-standing question for potential VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) consumers is “How much bandwidth does a VoIP phone require to make quality telephone calls?”
First of all, Bandwidth is defined as the ability to transfer data (such as a VoIP telephone call) from one point to another in a fixed amount of time. The higher the bandwidth speed you have, the more data you can send over your Broadband Internet connection.
There are two types of bandwidth at your location: upload bandwidth and download bandwidth. The Upload Bandwidth is the amount of data you can send to the Internet and download bandwidth is the amount of data you can receive from the Internet. The more Internet bandwidth you have from your ISP (Internet Service Provider) the better.
In most cases, the normal VoIP telephone call will use up 90 Kbps (kilobits per second). If you have a Broadband Internet service provider that doesn’t offer much bandwidth then most VoIP providers give you the option to lower the VoIP voice quality by lowering the bandwidth used for VoIP calls to 60 Kbps or, to really conserve your bandwidth, 30 Kbps. Most people can't tell the difference between the three settings. We suggest you use the high sound quality setting (90 Kpbs in most cases), if bandwidth is not an issue. High VoIP voice quality is generally the default setting but if you are running into a situation where your bandwidth is limited then you can adjust your VoIP bandwidth to one of the lower settings. Some consumers with 128 Kbps upload connections can receive less VoIP service quality due to a poor quality ISP (Internet Service Provider). By selecting a lower quality VoIP bandwidth setting, this problem can be avoided.
If you plan on using a VoIP service provider, should you get a DSL or a Cable Internet access provider? In general, DSL upload bandwidth starts at 128k where as Cable Internet upload bandwidth starts at around 600k. Cable Internet is a little bit more expensive, but it is also about 4-5 times faster than residential DSL and a bit friendlier to a VoIP telephone call. Having said that, both DSL and cable modem high-speed services provide sufficient broadband Internet access bandwidth to support any of the top VoIP service providers. If you are experiencing low Broadband Internet Service provider bandwidth, we suggest you try Packet8 VoIP. Packet8 VoIP boasts an advanced compression technology in which each active voice line uses approximately only 23Kbps of total data throughput, upstream and downstream.
The amount of bandwidth that a VoIP provider requires to make a quality telephone call is only one thing to consider when choosing a VoIP service provider. In fact, there are many things to consider when choosing a VoIP provider. An educated consumer generally results in a satisfied consumer.
Chris Landry is the foremost authority on residential and small business VoIP providers. Chris is the founder of http://www.VoIPChoices.com. Chris has prequalified several high-quality VoIP providers and compares them by price and features at http://www.VoIPChoices.com