What is the difference between VoIP and Hosted VoIP? - 19/11/10
Posted by Kevin Box on Fri, Nov 19, 2010 @ 10:51 AM
Telephone companies have spent the last hundred years making
things more and more complicated. At long last the advent of VoIP is turning back the clock and allowing things to become simpler again.
What is VoIP?
VoiP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. In the past, voices were carried as analogue signals along wires. Now is the system is almost entirely digitised and the digital signals are now carried in packets across the wires. These signals are almost always encoded using the Internet Protocol (IP) and this is VoIP.
Switching VoIP
All telephone networks consist of cables interconnected by switches. The switches were originally controlled by men but then very rapidly electromechanical switches took over, followed by electronics and now microprocessors.
When you pick up the phone you connect to a switch. In an office that switch is usually called a PBX (or Private Branch Exchange). This allows telephones in the office to connect to each other without paying call fees. The switch also allows incoming calls to connect to any of the phones within the office. The PBX used to sit in a cupboard in the office somewhere gathering dust and chewing through electricity.
As time went on, people made these switches clever and added more functions. So for example the PBX-controlled voice mail, gave you IVR (press one for this, two for that, etc.) and did different things at different times of the day.
When VoIP came along you could connect your phones in an office to the PBX using VoIP and then connect to the outside world using either analogue circuits or ISDN. This is often called on-site VoIP.
Hosted VoIP
The next logical step was to do away with the PBX in the office and connect phones directly to the Internet. This meant you could still allow phones within the office to connect without paying call fees but you could now also connect to other offices for free.
The phones are still connected to a switch which is now an array of severs, which are in the cloud, on the internet. Because so many people are now sharing the switch it effectively costs each user nothing and saves a lot of electricity. It is also a lot more powerful than any one person could normally afford and performs lots of functions which weren’t possible before, such as ringing mobiles and landlines together with “follow me”.
The servers carry a lot more calls than start from a single company and therefore call costs can be lower as well.
When a PBX was in an office someone had to go through all of the pain and anguish of dealing with multiple sales people, all of whom earned commission before choosing very expensive kit which was obsolete almost immediately. You then had a long term commitment to maintenance charges. With a hosted PBX solution there is no choice of PBX to be made. The remote PBX does everything you could want and is free, with no maintenance, while always being up to date.
Conclusion
For small to medium businesses there is simply no reason why anyone should even begin to consider a local PBX. To read more about Hosted VoIP and the different benefits offered by this service, contact Cloudnet (providers of business phone systems) on 01922 21 33 33 or log onto www.cloudnetuk.com.