Archive for August, 2006

VoIP Business – The Transition to VoIP

Friday, August 25th, 2006

Have you ever walked into work on a Monday morning and found this fancy new digital phone on your desk? Well if you have (and the odds are increasing fast), then I am guessing that it is unlikely that you stopped for a second to think about what was actually involved in getting it there. Hopefully you have not begun your Business VoIP experience by cursing the phone because you are having trouble using all the features. As such I hope you received proper training as to how to use the nifty new features that a Business VoIP system can provide.

Having installed a bunch of these systems in various sized organizations across the country, I thought that someone may be interested in the high level process of what is involved in transitioning a business from a legacy analog phone system to a new VoIP system. Who the heck does these installations anyway? Well it is extremely unlikely that a Cisco or an Avaya will actually do the installation for you. These companies will fight tooth and nail to convince you to purchase its voip solution, but after that, there is very little involvement from them. Unless of course you are part of a large enterprise which can demand and receive direct support.

So in the majority of cases a partner (e.g.   ) of these companies will actually perform the installation and manage the entire VoIP project. These partners are more commonly known as VARs or Value Added Resellers and are pretty much made up of a bunch a sales guys and a group of engineers specializing in various technologies such as telephony, security, wireless, etc. It is these engineers that actually do the installation, with the VAR charging the end customer anywhere between $150 and $250 an hour for its services. Now that has got your attention, hasn’t it? Yes, there is a lot of money to be made through VoIP. If only the poor engineer got paid that much. Well actually, a good VoIP engineer who can design and deploy an entire Business VoIP solution, will typically earn well over $100K per year in most parts of the country.

Next week I’ll go into some more detail on the actual process that companies go through when swapping over to Business VoIP .

Tony

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Cable VoIP v DSL VoIP

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006

Should I get cable VoIP or DSL VoIP? As more and more people use the internet and start to understand the different ways in which they can get High Speed Internet this question seems to be asked more and more.

First let me state one thing, VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol as the acronym states, is just Voice over your internet connection. Whether that internet connection is your phone line, your cable, your satellite or some wireless network the likes of Clearwire are starting to introduce it really does not matter, well almost - it’s never that easy :-)

The delay in Satellite communications can sometimes make a conversation difficult, you also need a guaranteed rate of about 90Kbps for a VoIP conversation over and above anything else you may be doing over the internet. I’m not saying it can’t be done but it’s not common.  

New wireless networks are emerging that are threatening “the last mile”. Instead of your internet being over a piece of wire(Cable or phone line) it is now wireless to a base station and then a local office, similar to a cell phone. These technologies are still emerging and are only available in a few select areas.

Now we get to DSL and Cable – what medium should I use?   

There is absolutely no difference between Cable and DSL in terms of what providers you can use, what plans you can have the features VoIP can give you or the installation in your home. The only real difference is the price you will pay. Here is a quick example of what I mean.

For DSL you need a phone line. For you to have that phone line it’s probably around $30 and this is before you pay for internet service. The actual DSL service is about $35 per month after any special deals have lapsed, so in reality you are paying somewhere in the region of $65 for your DSL. Cable tends to be around the $45 mark after the special deals have expired so you are $20 better off and that’s only for your internet.

Typical savings when switching to VoIP are around the $500 mark annually, when you take into consideration the potential saving by switching to cable you get close to $750 a year. 

What do I use? Comcast Cable with a higher bandwidth than the Verizon DSL I previously used and Lingo for all my calls. With this I save about $60 a month. Being Scottish friends say I am just cheap but I like to think I’m just smart :-)

Calum

 

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International Calls

Saturday, August 19th, 2006

Coming from another continent, my goal was to try and find a provider I could use to call the UK. Having spent months researching all the providers you see on this website I could narrow it down to just two Lingo and Packet8(This was 18 months ago, there are now a few more SunRocket and Vonage spring to mind). Obviously you as customer don’t want to or have the time to do the research we have.

We went through a few scenarios on how to tell our customers what countries a plan included but this really didn’t fulfill what we wanted to do, which was a mechanism for letting the customer tell us what country they were most interested in.  Most VoIP sites out there have a generic list of countries and rates to those countries but as more and more providers have specific countries included in their plan then this sort of information is almost useless. We wanted to display countries that are included in the plans monthly fee, effectively being free. 

From this concept we made our data base of plans searchable by country(Search option 5). This means that you can now find the country or city you are interested in and find the plans and service providers who have that country included in their plan.

Calum 

 

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Calling Brazil?

Saturday, August 12th, 2006

Lingo  now offer virtual numbers in the following cities Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Florianopolis, Fortaleza, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Your family and friends in Brazil can use the number to call to you for the price of a local call. The new features Lingo continues to add and it’s excellent customer service make it one of the top rated providers on our site.

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VoIP Review – VoIP Provider – VoIP Visits : TOP 5s for July

Sunday, August 6th, 2006

Each month on the WhichVoIP.com site we update our VoIP Top 5’s table to reflect the top VoIP provider in terms of user VoIP reviews, service provider searches on our site and provider site visits.

These statistics are purely a means of giving our readers further information to aid in their decision making process when searching for a new VoIP service provider.  By highlighting the top VoIP service providers for the current month you can see the general trend of the many thousands of visitors we get each month.

Now to the table.  For July 2006: 

VoIP Provider Search VoIP Reviews (over 5) VoIP Sites Visited
1. Vonage 1. VoicePulse 1. VoicePulse
2. Packet8 2. iConnectHere 2. Viatalk
3. Sunrocket 3. ITP 3. Sunrocket
4. VoicePulse 4. Lingo 4. ITP
5. Viatalk 5. Packet8 5. Packet8

Yet again, comes out top for VoIP reviews posted and VoIP provider site visits.  VoicePulse customers are very loyal and rarely do we see bad reviews for this service provider.

Tune in next month to see if VoicePulse still leads the pack at WhichVoIP.com. 

Andy

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