VoIP Service Placerville

How To Choose VoIP Service In Placerville?

Traditional telephones are going the way of fax machines and floppy disks. If they’re still hanging around a business, it’s generally only because that business hasn’t yet got around to making the switch to a VoIP service. If you’re thinking about making the switch, here’s what you need to know about choosing a VoIP service in Placerville.

Where To Start VoIP Service?

1. Start with looking at your past before you think about your future

If you’ve been reading up on VoIP, then you’ve probably read that it can offer a massively higher level of functionality than traditional telephones and even cell phones (which work in essentially the same way as traditional telephones). This is true and, over the long term, it can open up opportunities for major process improvements and/or cost savings.

Over the short term, however, the chances are that your staff are going to use your VoIP system in much the same way as they used the old telephone system. This means that your priority should usually be to support the functionality you already have, plus fill in any obvious existing needs (and possibly any obvious existing wants) before you start thinking about how you’re going to maximize the return on your investment by getting the most out of its advanced functionality.

It can be a good idea to think about where you might want to head in the future, so you can incorporate that into your current planning (as far as reasonably possible). Just remember to be realistic about how quickly changes can happen.

2. Be prepared to spend money before you save it

Unless you have significant excess capacity in your existing network infrastructure, then you’re going to need to upgrade it. How much you need to upgrade will depend on your plans for the present and potential for the future. In particular, it will depend on the extent, if any, to which you want to use video-calling within your organization.

Quite bluntly, in a business context video-calling is the biggest bandwidth hog there is. That’s fine if it really is essential to be able to see the person on the other end of the call, for example, in a training situation. A lot of the time, however, it’s essentially a social nicety. There’s nothing wrong with that, especially if you have staff (or freelancers) in different geographical locations and want to foster a solid team spirit between them VoIP handsets or both VoIP service. You do, however, have to accept that this comes at a price, which means that you have to decide whether the price can be justified.

You’re also going to think about the potential for internet outages and what they would mean for your business. Having said that, given that most SMBs are likely to be cloud-first if not cloud-native, this should probably be a consideration anyway. VoIP will, however, increase your need for a robust network.

3. Consider the impact on your network security

This is really a corollary of the previous point, but it’s important enough to highlight on its own. While traditional phone lines are far from immune to malicious attacks, their specialized nature makes them more challenging targets. VoIP services, by contrast, are subject to standard cyberattacks so robust security is an absolute must (but then it should be anyway).

Think carefully about whether you need softphones, VoIP handsets or both

Softphones are essentially phone apps, which run on any suitable hardware such as a computer or mobile device. This means that softphones only work when the parent device is switched on. VoIP handsets look and feel like traditional phones (desktop or cordless) but work through your network rather than through traditional phone lines. They work as long as they are connected and powered on.

Many companies prefer softphones for the fact that they are much easier to fit into smaller spaces. This is fine, just remember that a softphone will require a minimum level of hardware resources. It’s also worth noting that the quality of support for mobile devices is very variable so if this is important to you, then you should specifically test for it before you make a final decision.

Some companies, however, do prefer the “always-on” nature of VoIP handsets or are at least prepared to purchase them for staff members who want to use a device that closely resembles something with which they are already familiar.

4. Plan for a learning and development curve

Even if you are expecting your staff to start by using the VoIP service essentially as a regular phone service, you may have to provide some training on how to use it, especially if you are using softphones rather than VoIP handsets.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced VoIP service partner in Placerville, please click here now to contact Aperio.IT.