Everything you want to know about Business Telephony

There are several ways to provide your company with business telephony. In this article, we are going to discuss step by step what options there are and what the differences between them are.

Business Telephony Formerly

A company used to have an office with a physical telephone exchange. To this telephone exchange, a landline was connected by the engineer. This gave you a business phone number and you could make and receive calls. However, all phones had to be in the same building as the switchboard to make and receive calls.

Business Telephony Now

All countries within Europe have a broadband connection to the home or office. There is enough bandwidth to set up good stable voice connections over the Internet connection. A special protocol has also been developed to transport voice over the Internet: VoIP. This stands for Voice over IP.

Fixed phones are being adapted to this new way of business telephony: VoIP phones are being introduced.

These VoIP phones log on to the online telephone exchange of a VoIP provider. This will issue the business phone number and with it 1 or more VoIP accounts so that the VoIP phones can log on to the online PBX. This is the new business telephony.

The telephone connection is set up over the Internet. A physical telephone exchange is no longer needed. It also now no longer matters whether the phones are in 1 or several physical locations. If there is a good Internet connection, a stable VoIP connection can be set up between the VoIP phones and the VoIP PBX. This enables business calls over the Internet via the online PBX.

This is also supported by legislation in European countries: net neutrality is mandatory and no quality must be skimped on by Internet providers depending on the protocol used on the Internet connection.

There should also be no price discrimination due to this legislation. Voice traffic should be treated and charged equally as ordinary web traffic. Video traffic should also be treated equally as ordinary web traffic.

Meanwhile, the telephony providers are also all making the telephony solutions suitable for VoIP. New pricing models are emerging for business telephony with unlimited calls and new terms such as hosted telephony or cloud telephony are emerging by which is meant that the telephone exchange is now fully managed in the data centre of the business provider.

Hosted VOIP Telephony

Fixed telephony is no more: hosted VoIP is the new form of business telephony.

Depending on the platform used by the chosen VoIP provider, telephony solutions will be suitable for every industry and target group. The current telephone exchange can be replaced for VoIP telephony. This will be accelerated when ISDN ends: the old fixed telephony network.

One is now required to choose business VoIP for business telephony.

SIP Trunk

Large companies opt for this telephony solution where the telephone exchange installed in the office can still be used. They have a SIP trunk connection set up over the internet connection between the business telephony provider and their own local PBX, which provides the telephony functionalities.

So although the traffic can already be delivered digitally via VoIP, the PBX remains the same and people can be reached optimally.

This is a second telephony solution where companies can use a SIP trunk to have traffic delivered to whichever location they choose: the office or their own data centre.

Number portability

When switching to a new form of business telephony, legislators ensure that this can be done without any problems: existing telephone numbers must in fact be released by the current provider to the new provider. In this way, reachability is guaranteed for the fixed number and a company remains optimally accessible to existing customers. This also applies to mobile numbers.

There is also a third business telephony solution, namely the fixed-to-mobile option.

Fixed to Mobile

Here, a business number is forwarded to the entrepreneur's mobile phone. There are 2 types of fixed to mobile: delivering calls to a softphone installed on the mobile phone or delivering calls to the mobile phone itself without installation of further software.

We prefer fixed forwarding to mobile without further installation of a softphone. This way, calls always come in properly and you have the best accessibility. Thus, business telephony and mobile telephony have become 1. Customers rate this telephony solution as ideal, especially in the start-up phase of a company or if there are 2-3 of you and you are on the road a lot.

The benefits for choosing a cloud VOIP subscription from Belfabriek:

- All useful (optional) features such as call recording, choice menu and queue are included free of charge.
- User-friendly app for both Android and iOS
- No new hardware or phones needed
- All possible easy to remember phone numbers easily registered (e.g. Germany, Netherlands, USA, UK).