Computers have long since changed the way that businesses operate, but it's not always easy to figure out what your business needs. It isn't cost effective to adopt every single technological advancement on the market--especially since not every advancement works well enough to be worth your time--but communications is a key point that could always use improvement. To cut down on expensive wired phone lines and to make your communications more flexible, consider a few ways that VoIP can help.
What Is VoIP
Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP is a technique used to send your voice (or any sound) across networks, including the Internet. Your voice is recorded and converted into a digital format that computers can understand, sent across the network, and then converted into something that the person on the other side can hear.
This is achieved by audio codecs, a set of instructions that decide how the voice information is converted. Your voice could be reduced in quality in order to be sent faster, or kept with as much quality as possible. There are many codecs that exist in the professional and hobbyist communities for VoIP research, each with different levels of quality versus compact size (compression).
How Can VoIP Be Used In Business?
VoIP can be used in the same way as phone lines. In fact, most voice communications that go through phone companies become digital at some point as copper systems dwindle. The old switching systems are not what make the difference, as telephone companies may have been among the first to adopt computer systems for switching and transporting voice communications.
The main difference between traditional phone lines and VoIP systems is that traditional lines travel across copper wire. Copper is a finite, although still abundant, resource; whereas, Internet cables can be sent over Ethernet cables with less copper content or optical fiber cables made from synthetic glass.
Your business can simply use the Internet to call out of the building, either with your existing Internet wiring or with upgraded cables. For internal communications, there's no need to run copper wires for a new phone system; your existing computer network can be the beginning. More Internet cables and related equipment can be much more affordable than running new copper wires, although the difference in cost may depend on the size of your phone layout.
To figure out the best phone system and network layout, contact a phone systems professional like Communications Plus for communications network planning.
Share13 July 2015
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