Cheap VoIP Service Lodi

Finding a cheap VoIP service in Lodi

Many SMBs implement VoIP purely to reduce the cost of making calls. Some of them may then go on to explore its more advanced capabilities. Some, however, may be perfectly happy just enjoying the savings they make. If you’re looking for a cheap VoIP service in Lodi, here is what you need to know about finding one.

Steps To Getting Best VoIP Service

1. Start with what you have

Generally, you’re going to want to maintain the level of service you have at the moment, so this is your baseline for working out what you need. It’s also an opportunity to see if there are any straightforward ways you can use VoIP to enhance your service and/or cut costs further.  

For example, if you have staff who are based in the office but are frequently away from their desks, you could arrange for them to have a VoIP client installed on their cell phones or be given cordless VoIP handsets, so they can easily make calls wherever they are in the building.

If you have faxes then you need to decide if you are going to get rid of them or switch to Fax over IP. This is now both reliable and secure enough for even regulated industries. It’s now considered to be more secure than traditional faxes faxes since its print-on-demand system eliminates the security problems associated with paper faxes.  

Most VoIP service vendors will support Fax over IP. If, however, you want to work with one which doesn’t, you can fill the gap with a vendor who specializes in Fax over IP.

Be careful of including “value-add” services to your initial implementation. These will increase the scope of the project and hence its timescale and costs. This means that it will take longer for you to recoup the upfront expenses of the implementation. You may, however, want to make an exception for value-add services that could reduce your costs in some way. For example, conference-calling and/or video-calling might be worth including if they reduced the need for business travel.

2. Define the service standards you require

The key to a successful VoIP implementation is ensuring that the service quality is at least as good as the service offered by the traditional telephone network. This is basically about bandwidth. More specifically, it’s about high-quality bandwidth with minimal latency, jitter, and packet loss and reliable speeds both upstream and downstream.

From a business perspective, it also means ensuring that you stay on the right side of the law and the regulators. Remember that most VoIP systems are going to be used to transmit personal data, at least occasionally. This means that you have to keep data protection in mind at all times.

3. Calculate your traffic volume and pattern

You absolutely must know your peak traffic volume as you’ll need to ensure that there’s sufficient bandwidth to cope with it. Ideally, you’ll also know your pattern of usage. Hopefully, you’ll be able to determine this from your old telephone bills. This may not be particularly important if your usage is consistent throughout the year. It can, however, make a real difference if your usage varies since it could allow you to scale your bandwidth up and down to reflect the changes in the volume of traffic.

Once you know how much bandwidth you will require, your next step is to work out how you will organize it. For most SMBs, this will mean choosing between organizing hosting yourself (either in-house or managed) and then organizing a separate VoIP service or choosing a VoIP service vendor who can take care of the hosting for you.

4. Decide what you want from a VoIP service contract

Your historic telephone bills should give you a good idea of your calling patterns. You should be able to split out your usage between intra-building calls, intra-company calls, local calls, domestic calls, and international calls. International calls should be further split out by country. If possible you should also split out calls to cell phones as these may have different prices than calls to landlines in the same location.

Ideally, you should spend some time thinking about whether there is anything planned which might change your calling patterns. Do this before you start looking at specific offerings so you resist the temptation to add on services you don’t need “just in case”.

In addition to looking at call prices, it’s helpful to think about whether you might want to have some equipment bundled with your contract to allow you to spread the cost of purchasing it.

If you’d like to speak to one of the best cheap VoIP service partners in Lodi, please click here now to contact Aperio. IT