Advanced Telecommunication Systems

Voice Over IP Solutions -

The Benefits for Small and Medium Sized Business

Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP are becoming an ever increasingly popular way to communicate. Both business and consumers have taken up VoIP because of the benefits it offers, such as greatly reduced long distance telephone call costs.

Whereas the main benefits of VoIP have been call cost reductions, businesses are gaining benefits from the functionality of unifying their, voice, video, data and mobile networks, resulting in more effective communciations between staff, customer service, having a simpler telephony infrastructure in place, (since both data and voice use the same line, this lowers network maintenance costs) and the added benefits of follow-me-roaming, (if employees are required to travel they are easily contactable and can access all features of VoIP, as if they were in the office).

What is VoIP

VoIP is essentially communicating over an internet connection as opposed to a traditonal land line network. The technology behind this, is that VoIP converts the analog voice signal into a digital format, these digital signals are then compressed to save bandwidth and increase speed and sent through a network.

A single consumer may use a softphone which is a headphone, micropone and dialer, whereas a business of multiple users may use a Analogue Telephone Adapter (ATA), the ATA is a piece of VoIP hardware that converts traditional analogue telephone signals into digital signals.

VoIP Benefits

Some of the benefits include the folloiwng;

• Videoconferencing calls - reducing travel costs.

• Three way calling (between customer, service personnel and the business operator).

• Sending and receiving real time text and video/visual information during a call.

• Sending and receiving faxes.

• File transfer.

• Instant messaging.

• Electronic notification of voicemails.

• Call waiting, call forwarding and call number barring (These services might previously have been provided by a PBX)

• Document sharing (to ensure only one master copy is referred to thus avoiding the mistakes that occur when using multiple copies of a document).

• ‘Click to talk’ function to improve customer service, (and putting a website customer in touch with service staff.

• Make and receive VoIP calls over any broadband internet connection.

• Unified Communications takes IP communications a step further by using such technologies as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and presence along with mobility solutions to unify and simply all forms of communications, independent of location, time, or device. (Learn more about Unified Communications here).

ATS can help your company to get started with your VoIP requirements,

click here to take a look at our current Avaya IP Office Series of Handsets

or the Cisco Unified communications 7900 Series Handsets

or contact ATS on 1300 138 287 or email the ATS Sales Team for more information.

For the latest articles about the uptake of VoIP among Australian companies, please click here The Cutting Edge - Focusing on VoIP

ATS regularly host breakfast seminars and VoIP demonstrations - click here for more information.