Lower cost is one of the most common reasons businesses switch to a Cloud Private Branch Exchange (PBX) phone system. Cloud-based business phones can be significantly less expensive than PRI Lines or other on-premises deployments. However, there are many other benefits of cloud communication tools besides lower cost.

According to the CompTIA 2018 Cloud Computing Trends Research survey, the top business benefits of cloud adoption include:

• Simplicity and speed in adopting new features
• The ability to add new capabilities
• Modernizing legacy IT environments
• Avoidance of software upgrades and licensing fees

These benefits can all facilitate business agility, which is a competitive advantage. With a Cloud PBX phone system, organizations can achieve flexible scalability. Unlike with traditional PBX systems, new features can be added immediately without having to purchase equipment or pay licensing fees. A single Cloud PBX phone system can expand from 150 users to 300 without having to add new features.

Primary Rate Interface (PRI) circuits are a well-established technology for business phone systems. Investing in PRI can seem like a low-risk way to meet your company’s need for reliable, quality voice communications.

While PRI circuits are stable, they have some limitations compared to alternatives such as SIP Trunking for business. Before investing in PRI Lines, it's important to understand costs, how the technology works, and potential challenges.

For some specialized use cases, a PRI circuit is the right choice. To determine whether your business is best served by PRI, SIP, or a hybrid mixture of cloud and traditional phone technology

Today's business communications involve a lot more than just voice calls. While phones are still a critical tool for communications, professionals use a lot of different technologies to converse. In a given day, it's not uncommon for the average employee to rely on phones, email, mobile apps, chat, text, and video conferencing.

Recent technological advancements have expanded the options companies have in business phone systems. Increasingly, organizations are switching from dated options like Primary Rate Interface (PRI lines) to more integrated options like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to save costs.

Switching to internet-based phones is the right choice for some companies, but VoIP-only isn’t a robust enough solution for many businesses today. Many organizations can benefit more from a Unified Communications approach, which supports voice, text, conferencing, mobility, and other forms of communication.

If you’re evaluating new business phone systems, you may be wondering what the difference is between Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and VoIP, and which is best.

In 2018, your customers still want to call your business.

The most common reason people pick up the phone is to get a question answered quickly or to talk to a real human, according to a recent Google study. Understanding that phone calls still matter for customer service and employee collaboration is a pretty simple idea.

What’s less straightforward is choosing the right type of phone system for your business. With options like PRI Lines, SIP Trunking, and VoIP, simply keeping all of the acronyms straight is difficult. Selecting the option that will offer the most value for your business is even more complex.

If you’re trying to understand the advantages and limitations of PRI Lines, you're in the right place. PRI technology has some distinct pros and cons, each of which can impact companies in different ways.

Organizations are making the switch to cloud-based communication tools for better security, reliability, and cost-savings. According to one recent study, an estimated 62% of businesses have made the switch to SIP trunking. With a Unified Communications vendor, organizations who adopt SIP trunking can unlock a standard set of protocols for cloud-based business phone and multimedia data exchange.

For many organizations, the benefits of switching to a SIP trunk over alternatives such as PRI phone lines are clear. However, the path to finding the right provider and achieving a seamless implementation of cloud-based business phones can be more complex. How do you ensure satisfaction and quality of service once your new business phones are live?

Is the “best” hosted voice-over-IP (VoIP) solution much different for a small business than it is for an enterprise?

Actually, not entirely.

Organizations of all sizes need the same thing from their hosted VoIP solutions, which is quality. When quality is defined as the value for cost, it’s the single most significant predictor of customer satisfaction and quality of experience.

Making the switch to hosted voice can allow your organization to unlock significant cost savings while achieving a solution that meets the needs of your mobile and remote employee workforce. However, finding the right provider isn’t always straightforward.

There’s no shortage of vendors, and these options can vary significantly in terms of service options, pricing, and approach. Even if you’re certain that voice-over-IP (VoIP) is the right approach, vendor selection is another story entirely, and proceeding with caution is an important tool to avoid dissatisfaction with your new business phone system.

Upgrading to hosted voice shouldn’t be challenging, but far too many organizations experience hidden costs, quality dissatisfaction or other pitfalls due to confusion during the vendor selection process.

Selecting the right vendor from the 20 registered internet service providers who offer business-class connectivity in Bethesda, Maryland is likely to play a significant part in your employee and customer experience.

Chances are, you’re aware that you can save quite a bit of money on your business telephone communications by bundling service into a package with your internet connectivity.

Whether you’ve already decided to make the switch from traditional telephone service to IP-based phone service (VoIP) or you’re already using cloud-based phone services, evaluating vendors who offer both internet and voice on the same network could be the right move.

However, a lower price paid each month is only one benefit you can realize with bundling if you select the right option from the best business internet and telephone packages available now. With the right vendor, you can unlock the full range of long-term business advantages associated with Unified Communications as a Service or UCaaS - a technological baseline for next-generation communications.

Even though cloud communication tools are everywhere, some organizations are still clinging to premises-based phone systems for a variety of reasons. Perhaps your organization hasn’t made the switch to Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) yet, either.

Reasons not to adopt modern technology vary, and some make more sense than others. Some of the most common include:

1. Trying to realize returns on the high, upfront investment of on-premises phones
2. Employees are used to the on-premises phones and find adopting new technology difficult
3. Insufficient bandwidth due to low quality Internet connectivity or a lack of access to fiber-optic Internet connectivity options

While organizations may feel the need to “pay off” their five-year-old TDM Private Branch Exchange before they adopt voice-over-IP (VoIP), the decision not to switch can often end up costing more than the switch itself.