Hosted IP telephony is often suited for businesses that prefer to outsource telephony requirements, allowing a third party service provider to control and manage their phones and PBX.
As a general rule, modest sized businesses – or businesses that have many sites (including home working personnel) are more suited to hosted telephony as can businesses that have dedicated Ethernet-based leased line connectivity.
The arguments for adopting a hosted IP telephony solution can be difficult to argue: from reduced telephony costs to professional PBX functionality that provide enterprise level features and benefits to less than enterprise sized businesses. However, this in turn has given rise to a plethora of hosted IP telephony providers and it can be extremely difficult to separate the good from the… not so good.
If it is such that hosted IP telephony is the right solution for your business, we recommend that more than just the per user per month fee is examined. Here at 500, we will only recommend best of breed and you can be assured that we will have investigate the following on your behalf:
- track record and experience in hosted IP telephony
- hosted telephony as a core business rather than an add-on
- end-to-end call security / encryption
- fully redundant architecture
- business-grade call quality
- customer support provisioning
If your business is considering hosted IP telephony but this decision is still to be finalised, our Comparison Matrix, which reviews the primary differences between premises-based and hosted IP telephony, may help.
