BIZ|Tech Blog

According to industry statistics, 31% of businesses use some form of Voice over (VoIP) IP service today.  While the available statistics are not too specific, I suspect that this percentage represents mostly larger companies.  The same study indicates that by 2013, a total f 74% of businesses will use some form of VoIP.  This number is large enough to include many small and medium businesses.

In my experience, concern about call quality often stops smaller businesses from moving to VoIP.  That being said, the great potential savings involved, and the growing acceptance of VoIP for home phone service is winning them over.  In many cases however, once a smaller business decides to consider VoIP, they run into a roadblock - their legacy phone system.

To be honest, I would like to sell everyone with a legacy system who wants to deploy VoIP a new system.  It would mean better profit for me, and better satisfaction and superior call handling for them.  That being said, it is possible and practical to deploy VoIP with a legacy phone system.  This approach does not require ANY changes to the legacy phone system.

With the growing acceptance of VoIP, a number of manufacturers have begun  to produce analog to VoIP gateways.  These devices have a network connection and an analog line port.  The network connection is connected to your network, and the analog port to a phone line on your existing phone system.  The gateway is then programmed to communicate with a VoIP provider.

When a VoIP call arrives, your gateway converts it from VoIP to analog, and connects it to your phone system.  As far as the phone system can tell, it is an analog line.  Using this approach, you can mix and match analog and VoIP service to increase your capacity and minimize your costs.

We did an installation last week of a Patton 4112, 2-port analog gateway.  It was easy to configure, and resulted in excellent call quality.

In summary, if you want to get your feet wet with VoIP, but you also want to preserve your legacy phone system investment for as long as possible, consider a gateway.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.