VOIP

Breaking Down the Basics of a Hosted Phone Solution

When your business starts evaluating how to improve business and communications, you probably hear about making the transition to a hosted or cloud phone solution. But you might be wondering what exactly these solutions can offer? And can they truly improve your business operations?

To begin, it’s important to understand what a hosted phone system is. According to Techopedia, a hosted phone system is defined as:

“Hosted private branch exchange (hosted PBX) is a telephone exchange system built, delivered and managed by a third-party service provider. Hosted PBX is an IP-based telephony solution provisioned and accessed entirely through the Internet.”

How a Hosted Phone Solution Works

A hosted PBX provides the same services you would expect from a traditional phone system with analog lines, but uses the internet and the cloud to support your services. The service is delivered using a telecommunications provider and Internet or IP-based networks. The systems are housed and monitored at the provider’s location.

How Does the Cloud Play In?

The voice and data services and applications your business uses are also hosted on the servers the provider owns and provide the business with access to the cloud. Customers only pay for services and applications they are using, providing a cost-effective, secure, and reliable environment.

Hosted Solution Benefits

Cloud communications become attractive because the cloud becomes the central platform for voice, data, and video. Traditionally, hosted services were built around voice, and were referred to as hosted VoIP. Cloud communications serve as an enhanced platform …

Why Invest in VoIP and a Small Business PBX System?

When making a business case for switching to a small business PBX system that works with the power of VoIP and the cloud, you may need some supportive evidence to convince the leaders of the company that it’ll be worth their time and the investment. The good news is, that there’s no shortage of information to showcase the enhanced productivity and ROI that switching to a small business PBX can provide. Here are five compelling figures:
1. Small businesses switching to a VoIP solution reduce the cost of their local calling expenses by up to 40%, and international calling savings averages 90%
Without VoIP, companies are required to use plain old telephone service (POTS) lines, which come with a hefty price tag for every minute spent on the phone. Those minutes add up quickly and typically result in a steep monthly bill, especially in the case of international calls. With VoIP, calls are made using the company’s internet connection, which removes the need for those costly POTS lines.
SOURCE
2. VoIP can cut startup costs for new businesses by up to 90%
With no need for phone lines and expensive and bulky traditional phone systems and hardware that can rapidly increase startup expenses, the cost savings are immediate.
SOURCE
3. Businesses see an average savings of 50-75% after switching to VoIP
Although this can vary depending on the organization, changing to a small business PBX system with VoIP provides an average cost saving of 50-75% on traditional …

Creating a Secured Unified Communications Strategy

The task of creating a secured unified communications (UC) strategy might seem overwhelming. But with VOIP the convenience of email, instant messaging, web collaboration apps, voicemail, and video means that businesses today are taking on the challenge. In doing so, however, leading businesses are realizing the importance of making the change with security as their top priority.
Valid Concerns
Here are the common security concerns businesses today face with UC:

IP-based security concerns
Mobile usage and password security
Data access and usage
The risks of data loss on public access points
Software and application usage and storage

While your small business may not have the means to implement the sophisticated and costly communications security measures that large organizations can afford, this doesn’t mean you’ll be left to face the threats unarmed. There are many simple and effective solutions you can implement.
Securing Individual Mobile Devices
Authentication

Investigate ways to authenticate each device your employees will be using. Once you’ve found the tool that suits your organization, implement it and only allow access to authenticated devices.

Encryption

Unlike communication exchanged within your brick and mortar location, messages and data sent over the internet aren’t going just to the intended recipient, they are traveling through many servers. Implementing end-to-end message and data encryption ensures your messages and data remain encrypted from the time they are sent to the time they are received, minimizing the chances of sensitive information falling into hostile hands lurking on the internet.

Lock and Kill

Require that every device to be used has a remote lock in place …

VOIP Comparison

VoIP Comparison: Hybrid, Hosted, or On-Premise?

If you’re still trying to find a VoIP solution, the following VoIP comparison of the most popular options should help to put things into a clearer perspective.

VoIP Benefits

Productivity increases.
Increased efficiency/cost savings.
Unparalleled features that are not available with traditional phones.
Increased flexibility, convenience and mobility.
VoIP provides remote operation, voicemail, call waiting, call forwarding and toll-free numbers.
The convenience of seamless voicemail to email transcription so you can forget about taking notes.
VoIP provides the capacity to smoothly integrate an analog door phone and the convenience and security of two-way calls with visitors. In addition, this gives you and your staff the ability to use a phone to unlock the door and allow or decline visitor access. This feature is valuable under any circumstances, and especially in situations at night with limited staff.
Your company can select a customized Music On Hold feature.
The call routing feature can make you look like a major VIP. The system, named Find me/Follow me, gives you the convenience of creating your personal list of reach numbers at locations where you might be found before the call goes to voicemail. You make the location decisions for the system to try whether it’s your personal cell phone, home office, or other locations. You also select the number of rings for each different location. If the system is unsuccessful in finding you and the list is exhausted, the call is sent to voicemail.

Hosted, On-Premise, or Hybrid?
When evaluating …

International Business & Michigan VOIP: How it Works

Taking a Michigan-based business global is a big undertaking. From organizing the operational elements to staffing and time zone challenges, there’s a list of things to evaluate and coordinate. One of the items to consider should obviously be to determine and organize how you can effectively communicate despite the increased distance limitations. Thankfully, Michigan VoIP services partnered with a Unified Communications (UC) phone system can provide the collaboration tools you need to be successful globally.

Some of the features that make this international success possible include:

Video Tools

Face-to-face meetings and events are simplified with solutions that offer video conferencing features, making team collaboration more effective. It also improves the hiring process, as top applicants can interview from anywhere – without the travel costs of getting them to you.

Remote Flexibility

VoIP provides the ability to access call records and receive calls despite distance limitations, allowing employees to be productive from anywhere. One of the other major benefits of VoIP technology on a global scale is the ability to create virtual phone numbers for specific countries, giving the appearance of the local or global organization to your customers.

Improved Customer Experience

Even with increased mobile opportunities for employees, businesses still want to have a professional appearance to their customers. With a UC solution, global companies are able to configure VoIP solutions so the calls are routed to specific locations and even translated into a different language to meet the needs of the customer.

Money Savings

Gone are the …

What do You Really Know About Low Rate VOIP? And is it Right for You?

Believe it or not, Voice Over Internet Protocol (or, ‘VoIP’ as it is more commonly referred to) is now 20-years-old. However, despite it’s two-decade presence in the market, many business owners are still confused as to what it does and how it can save them money and increase productivity.

In a survey conducted by Hello Operator, they found that nearly 71% of consumers couldn’t define what VoIP is without getting a contextual cue. And surprisingly enough, even though younger users are thought to be more “tech-savvy” than older users, the report indicates they aren’t any more knowledgeable about VoIP than their older coworkers.

Since it’s clear more people need to understand the wide-spread benefits of wholesale VoIP for business, let’s point out some important facts about the service:
What exactly is VoIP?
According to dictionary.com, they define VoIP as:

A technology or set of standards for delivery of telephone calls and other voice communications over the Internet, involving the conversion of analog voice signals to digital form.

Because calls are made over the Internet rather than traditional analog phone lines, this provides a great deal of opportunity for a reduction in IT and phone company costs as well as the ability to provide more enhanced communication features that were costly additions for the traditional, analog services.
Is it reliable?
According to the same Hello Operator study, the main concerns with implementing a low rate VoIP solution are reliability during a power outage and call quality.

As for power outages, the …

VOIP: A Smarter Choice

You’ve been hearing for awhile now that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is something every business today should evaluate. You know it’s been said to increase productivity and reduce costs for businesses. But what exactly makes the service able to provide all these voice solutions so easily?

The process of how it works is quite simple, the service allows users to make calls using the Internet instead of using a conventional phone system or analog phone lines. It converts the sound into a digital voice communication and then transfers it through the Internet connection. This is done by breaking down the voice stream into packets, those packets are then compressed and sent over the Internet to the destination. After the packets are uncompressed and put back together, the other party receives the message. This may sound like a long process, but it is rapid and seemless with the proper bandwidth connection.

Here’s number of reasons why it’s simply a smarter choice for businesses today:

1. Cost Savings

VoIP is much less expensive than implementing comparable services over analog connections. The first and most noticable cost savings comes with the lack of additional costs to add or install new phone lines. The equipment will hook directly into the broadband network, making changing and adding lines convenient and easy. The change virtually eliminates phone line costs, long distance fees and lowers the amount of IT services needed to add or install new services. The phone …

How to Compare VOIP Providers

If you’ve landed here, you are probably one of the smart small business owners looking to experience the benefits of a hosted VoIP telephone system. You know that a traditional system either isn’t making financial or productivity sense for your business anymore. But with such a massive amount of choices out there today, you know you will need to do a VoIP comparison to determine which option is the right one for your particular business.

Here are some helpful tips to help you conduct your VoIP comparison:

Tip #1: Know What Your Needs Are

Telephone systems today can do pretty much anything aside of making you a grilled cheese sandwich, but that doesn’t mean you need every feature they can provide. Additionally, each of those features can cost you more money, so you will want to invest your resources into the functionality that is going to deliver the biggest return for your business. Think about what features you will actually use during your day-to-day operations, and if you know you probably won’t use most of the options that particular system provides, you may want to lower your price point. (That’s a good problem to have though, right?!)

Tip #2: Ask Questions

The market is saturated with VoIP providers today, obviously some of them are good providers and some of them are not. You need to be able to identify the good from the bad, and the best way to do so is to ask …

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Millennia Technologies is a full-service voice and data solutions company for midsize to enterprise customers. Specializing in UCaaS , CCaaS , Cybersecurity , IoT , Voice , Cloud , and more. Our passion is firmly rooted in showing clients how well-designed data solutions can significantly accelerate business operations, and then celebrating their goal-shattering successes.