VoIP

[Jim Mason]

Lately, I have been reading about VoIP and have talked with tech guys that are enthusiastic about this service. I am willing to use it but I cannot see an advantage over my smartphone.

Can someone explain how VoIP would benefit me in a ways that would be better than my phone and that I can understand?

Any help here would be appreciated.

 

[Josh]

If you have an unlimited cell phone plan and that's what you primarily use then it's probably useless. The biggest advantage of voip was it made things like vonage and magicjack bring unlimited phone plans at reasonable prices vs traditional landline plans. With unlimited cell phone plans getting so cheap it really isn't a huge benefit.

Of course it's also been used to power dialers, but that's not as relevant to your question. Does that help? Did you have a more specific question?

 

[Jim Mason]

I don't have any more specific questions at this point. I have been perplexed as to the excitement over this service when I have been unable to discern a significant advantage. Just thought I might have been missing something. There have been "aha" times when I finally understood other technologies that have become an important tool to use.

With all the hype, just wanted to know if I was missing something and knew this was the place to ask.

 

[GreenSky]

Generally speaking, cell phones do not have the sound quality of either land lines or voip. Yes, I know some agents only have them and they think their cell phone sounds great. But for those of us on the other end of the call this may not be the case.

If you have a high speed internet connection get something like OOMA. You pay about $100 for the device and a few bucks for the mandatory 911 service each month. I've added a few bells and whistles to my service which adds maybe $100 year.

It's a small price to pay to have a phone that can be clearly heard by those I'm speaking with. If you think saving a few bucks is worth a less than great connection just use a cell phone.

Rick

 

[Sales71]

I don't have any more specific questions at this point. I have been perplexed as to the excitement over this service when I have been unable to discern a significant advantage. Just thought I might have been missing something. There have been "aha" times when I finally understood other technologies that have become an important tool to use.

With all the hype, just wanted to know if I was missing something and knew this was the place to ask.

I use Ring Central for my office and it works great. Used to have AA&T for my office used to pay $340 a month now I pay $108 for 3 lines and it has lots of feature that I like. I also get faxed on it and it goes to my E Mail. If you are a life guy a cell phone is fine but P&C is not good to give your cell numbers to clients.

 

[david_adams]

The excitement about VoIP is mostly about features and costs. If you're a one-man operation, you can probably get by just using your mobile phone for everything. But if you need phone lines for several people, and you want to be able to do things like set up an IVR to route calls, or be able to transfer calls between people, or forward voicemails, or have voicemails be sent to people's email, or transcribed and emailed, or be able to pre-route calls from certain sources to particular extensions automatically, or automatically send calls from certain sources to voicemail without ringing, etc, then back in the bad old days (ten years ago) you needed to buy an extremely expensive phone system. But with VoIP, you can replace that tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollar system with a $500 PC and $150 phone terminals.

The server software is free or cheap, and generally the phone service itself is very cheap too. I pay $2 per month per line and one cent per minute. International rates are also very low.

The downside is that setting up a VoIP system takes a considerable amount of expertise. You also need to be careful. Someone I know didn't do a good job, and a Romanian hacker broke into their system and racked up a couple hundred dollars of charges calling one of the foreign countries where the rates aren't particularly low.

But the short version is that if you're going to run a feature-rich phone system for a business that needs one, VoIP slashed the costs by about 95% compared to what they used to cost.

 

[Jim Mason]

Very helpful, guess I will keep doing what I am doing for a while until some new magic doohickey that will actually benefit me.

Thanks.

 

[ResearchSmith]

The money saving aspect is the main reason to choose VoIP.

 

[webby]

VOIP is great for an office environment. My favorite aspect of VOIP is that you can take the phone home with you and plug it into your router and work from home. Any calls you get would be just like if you were at home and you can even dial other worker's extensions the same.