Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) does so much more than offer a dial tone and good quality phone calls. Because the service goes over the Internet instead of the phone company's lines, a VoIP phone system can include many features that are not possible with ordinary phone service. Whether you're a consumer or a business owner, VoIP services give you services that can make you appear to be in two places at once, and create the illusion that your organization is much larger than it really is.
The phone company, in delivering what most call "plain old telephone service" or POTS, has actually come a long way in delivering value added services such as voicemail, caller ID and call forwarding (although each one usually comes with an incremental cost as well). A VoIP phone system however, has POTS beat on all fronts.
Because the VoIP phone system uses Internet technology instead of the phone company's circuit-switched technology, there are several features that a VoIP phone system can do that the POTS system cannot. A few of the most useful features include:
If you have a VoIP phone system, you can access your voicemail online from any computer, anywhere in the world.
You can store entire phone conversations to replay later.
A key promise of VoIP phone systems is unified messaging, with which you can access any type of message, including voicemail, email, or electronic fax, from a single interface.
A VoIP phone system can give you multiple "virtual" phone numbers, with different area codes that you can use for different purposes, all of which will ring through to your central phone.
Call quality is no different from traditional phone service.
And for those who travel frequently, VoIP is a no-brainer because of its inherent portability. Because the VoIP phone system is not tied to your physical address like POTS is, you can take it with you wherever you go—even if you are going overseas. If your home is in Chicago and you go to Shanghai, you can still make and receive calls on your Chicago number as if you were still in the Windy City. In fact, nobody even needs to know you've left.
For the budget-minded, by far the best feature of a VoIP phone system is the low cost. While traditional phone service is usually based on a model of charging for each service, VoIP providers typically build in far more features in the basic service at no extra charge. In addition, the old-fashioned model of charging for long distance by the minute is nearly obsolete. Because VoIP uses a high-speed Internet backbone, there is almost no incremental cost for each additional minute spent on a call, and most VoIP providers offer a flat-rate service that lets you talk all you want, anywhere in the country, for a single price.
For the business-minded, the ability to make and receive calls through a software-based phone on your computer also leads to tremendous business benefits. The VoIP system can be used at the same time as other business applications such as presentation software or even video—making inconvenient face-to-face meetings completely unnecessary.
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