Comparing Business Phone Systems

When comparing business phone systems, It may be overwhelming for the less experienced when choosing the right business phone system, as there are so many options to consider.

Today, with a generation that communicates through telephone, email, texts, video chats, conference calls, and social media, it is nearly impossible to imagine using a legacy phone system that uses only voice calls. Despite that, many companies still rely on out-of-date communications and experience the risks associated with legacy phone systems. Fortunately, upgrading from an outdated system to a modern Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or Unified Communications (UC) solution saves time and money, and improves customer and employee satisfaction.

In Canada and the US, almost 70% of small businesses still use antiquated telephone systems. Small business owners maintain that upgrading these still functioning phone systems is not a necessity even though they are still functioning. Manufacturers such as Nortel and Avaya dominated the Canadian and USA markets for several years. These business phone systems where state-of-the-art in the 1990’s and lasted years. In comparison with today, it would be like using an analog Motorola brick cellular phone, or a computer with Microsoft Windows 95.

The learning curve challenge is that humans resist change until it is too late. Small business owners pay between 40-70% more each month for their legacy analog telephone lines, have costly maintenance and support costs, and in some cases legacy telephone systems are left partially operational as spare parts are no longer available.

These business owners are quickly being left behind in the absence of mobility and rich features. While the competition can respond in real-time to customers and colleagues from anywhere using any device, maintaining their corporate presence.

Now that you’ve started your journey to find the best small business phone system, let’s start by looking at some of the challenges a legacy phone system has. Then we can compare the different types of VoIP business phone systems.

Essentially, legacy phone systems consist of outdated technologies that are difficult to maintain and fail to offer modern features, like mobility. Generally, these legacy phone systems connect to the phone company via traditional analog phone lines. For the simple reason that the networking infrastructure itself is becoming obsolete – providers are no longer investing in it – experts have pointed out that legacy phone systems won’t last indefinitely.

Vendors begin to “end of life” legacy phone systems once they get too old, which triggers a ripple effect. Several factors make repairs expensive: First, because there is a lower demand for the parts (since more and more companies switch to VoIP solutions), the parts become more costly. The second reason is that the manufacturer of these telephone systems may not even make spare parts anymore. This requires a company to purchase used replacement parts, which are expensive and of questionable quality.

Further, as these older phone systems get older, so do the skilled engineers and technicians who can repair them, which makes them hard to find and expensive to hire. Simply put, the longer a business keeps investing in an outdated legacy phone system, the more expensive and challenging it becomes to replace.

Lack of Features & Functionality
Making sure customers are directed to the correct department without playing telephone tag is vital. Exactly why? VoIP phone systems can provide superior customer service, so if you don’t, your competitors will. More functionality than 3-way calling and caller ID is needed by employees and customers. These features enhance productivity and customer service, including video chat, instant messaging, presence, voicemail to email, and call recording. A Unified Communications solution offers these features and more.

Legacy Connectivity
Due to the limitations of analog and digital telephone lines, connecting remote sites and mobile users is almost impossible. It also comes without saying that the costs of these telephone lines are high. Regardless of where you are located, all local calling areas are limited to the boundaries of that city. Any calls outside of that are subject to high long distance calling rates.

Very Costly
In addition to being cumbersome to maintain, spare parts are often difficult to locate or are otherwise unavailable since these manufacturers are no longer in business. It was very difficult to program these legacy telephone systems, even to change the time and date on a phone. Anything beyond this usually requires a phone system technician to visit the site. This could take several days and upwards of 200.00 per service call, as well as an hourly rate of 150.00 plus.

Security Vulnerabilities 
Security can also be compromised by old phones. The moment vendors stop providing patches, updates, and bug fixes, you’ll face increased cybersecurity risks.

Non Expandable
In the past, legacy systems were built for a specific purpose and were not easily scalable. Adding another user would require the installation of a complete new system if the PBX was at full capacity.

Smaller phone systems were also known as key systems or KSUs and were designed to accommodate X number of extensions and X number of lines. The 3×8 KSU Nortel Meridian is a good example, where the 3 represents the total number of external telephone lines, and the 8 represents the total number of extension lines. Auto Attendant and voicemail were separate systems that were externally connected to the PBX. Also, installation was time-consuming and involved cross-connecting and punching down wires in order to connect telephone lines and extensions on BIX panels.

Hosted PBX Cloud Phone System, also known as Cloud PBX or Virtual PBX resides in the VoIP service providers data center. To keep it simple: it is a virtual phone system that provides a secure and reliable business phone system via the Internet. The VoIP service provider owns and manages the PBX, infrastructure, equipment and software.

It is imperative to note that a cloud-based private branch exchange (PBX) is a phone system that is exclusive to your business and relies on high-speed Internet to connect callers. While a cloud-based phone system is still powered by hardware, that hardware is generally located at a data center remote from the customers, rather than on-site as would be the case with a traditional PBX system. As a result, the term ‘hosted’ or ‘virtual’ PBX system has become commonly used to describe cloud-based PBX systems. A company that specializes in supplying business phone services is hosting the hardware and delivering phone service virtually through the Internet.

For the Hosted PBX to operate as expected you will require a broadband high-speed internet connection, a router that supports the ability to disable SIP ALG, and a VoIP desktop phone set or mobile soft phone app. A major advantage of the service is the fact that you don’t have to manage and monitor the equipment yourself. In addition to your provider taking care of hardware, the system is located at the service providers data centre (in-the-cloud) so you don’t need any the physical PBX phone system hardware at your office.

Deployment
Due to the fact that the Hosted PBX is provided “as a service,” it can be rapidly configured and deployed.

Low start-up costs
Investing risks are minimized, and capital expenditures are reduced. Hosted PBX services are billed as monthly recurring charges (MRCs) and are considered operating expenses. Subscriber MRCs may be calculated according to number of users, channel/call paths, minutes, or advanced features.

Enterprise grade advanced features
You will have access to the latest functionality with a hosted solution. Small and Medium businesses have access to enterprise-grade capabilities. Since the Hosted Cloud PBX is constantly upgraded, new features and functionality are pushed out to the end-users and can be implemented almost immediately, avoiding upgrade costs, delays, and the need for involving internal resources. Delivering a true unified communications solution.

Highly flexible and scalable
The web-based administration allows you to make changes quickly and easily. You can manage moves-adds-changes (MAC) needs, add remote users, optimize services, enable features, and scale capacities and capabilities based on demand in real-time.

24/7 monitoring
Performance remains high thanks to round-the-clock monitoring by service providers.

Disaster recovery
Automatic scheduled complete back-up of PBX configuration files, voicemails, call recordings and call detail reports are backed up off site.

Redundancy
Multiple data centres are located across the globe, ensuring the customers Hosted PBX is always backed-up, secured and on-line.

Fail-over
In the event of an internet or power outage, incoming calls can be automatically or manually redirected to predetermined alternate locations, like cell phones, branch offices, or anywhere outside the affected site.

Updated
When new features and software updates become available they are automatically pushed to the Hosted PBX.

Highly secure
The Hosted PBX resides in a multi million dollar secure data centre, behind redundant enterprise grade firewalls. Managing, maintaining, and upgrading an on-premise VoIP solution can be a hassle, costly, time-consuming project. Managed Hosted VoIP eliminates all of these headaches, hassles, costs, and complexity. No additional power costs are incurred. Investing in IT resources can allow companies to focus on other strategic activities. Reduce network costs by combining voice and data traffic on the same network.

Lower Total Cost of Ownership:
As time passes, recurring service charges add to operating budgets, eroding the savings initially made from CapEx. As well as bandwidth upgrades, services may need to be upgraded in order to be adequately supported.

An upgrade/improvement to the system is on the provider’s schedule:
Although many modifications can be made to services through web-based administration, overall system improvements are out of your control.

Customization is limited:
With pre-packaged offers, providers often decide what applications, specifications, and configurations to include.

QoS and service interruption:
Hosted PBX call quality is subject to the customers local internet and network configuration. If there is not adequate internet speeds to support VoIP or if the networking equipment does not support VoIP, the customer will have a poor experience.

Lack of control:
Companies with concerns about call recordings, voicemails, and other data that are stored on an external server may find it difficult to let go of telecom management.

An On-Premise IP PBX is very similar in design to a landline PBX to where the physical equipment is deployed on premise at your location, coupled with SIP trunks (VoIP telephone lines), equipped with all the latest and greatest advanced features that a cloud PBX has to offer. From a feature set perspective, the customer will have the same experience be it in the cloud or on premise.

The on premise IP PBX unlike a traditional business phone system connects over your internal local area network (LAN) to VoIP phone sets, desktop and mobile apps.

Establishing remote users is also possible, with physical desktop VoIP Phones, desktop Windows or Mac softphones or Android and iOS mobile devices.

One of the core advantages of an On-Premise IP PBX is that, it is very flexible and customizable. It also supports analog phone lines, digital phone lines and SIP Trunks “VoIP telephone lines”. The benefit here of course, is if you do not have adequate internet services to support SIP Trunks, you can still benefit from of all the latest advanced features.

For starters, modern business phone systems are far more easier to manage with an intuitive, user-friendly WEB based control panel vs. making changes to your phone system using the phone set.

On-premise IP PBX solutions offer several compelling reasons to adopt them. Here are some benefits that you can expect from an IP PBX that is kept and maintained on your premises instead of being hosted by your provider.

Benefits of an  On-Premise IP-PBX:
On-Premise IP PBX solutions offer several compelling reasons to adopt them. Here are some benefits that you can expect from an IP PBX that is kept and maintained on your premises instead of being hosted by your provider.

• An On-Premise IP PBX has a lower total cost of ownership, in most cases there would be an immediate ROI when coupled with SIP trunks “VoIP Telephone Lines”.
• You have better control over your internal network and data, if you own the equipment and keep them on premises.
• IP PBX equipped with SIP Trunks ensures that inbound phone calls can be automatically routed to alternate locations or phone numbers if the internet or power is down. Your customers will always be able to reach you.
• More ability to determine the level of security that will meet your needs.
• Your IT security team might prefer an on-premise PBX so they can apply their own solutions.

To learn more on how to choose the right business phone system for your business, give one of the experts at cloudworx a call today to book a free consultation: 1-888-969-4412 or click here to use our online booking system.