VoIP for Dummies 2005

160 Part III: Making the Move to VoIP

The company would work out an acceptable service plan with their carrier. They would need to have or acquire POTS-type telephones for each user. In the plan, the company should minimize what the per-minute usage rates are going to be for all regulated services categories. In addition, the company would establish what add-on charges are acceptable in the way of call features on one or more of the lines.

Because all employees will probably have voice mail, the company can cut some costs by getting voice mail for only a subset of the total number of lines to be leased. Voice mail usually comes with the ability to set up five or so mail boxes per line at no additional cost. If you get voice mail on the main number, you can set up a “hunt group” that rolls to the next line when the receptionist is unavailable, or you can have the caller leave a voice mail to any employee by leaving directions on the voice mail narrative (for example, “press 1 for Ms. Smith, press 2 for Mr. Williams”). Other call features can be added on the lines that need them.

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POTS lines

The bottom line with POTS is that each employee has a traditional phone. Some have more than one line to support a fax or dial-up modem services. The company gets the bill each month for all these lines, their respective service charges, and all add-on charges.

If your company has a computer network, you owe it to your financial health to at least take a look at VoIP. To get a total picture of what it is costing you or your company, divide your total monthly carrier services bill by the number of lines you are leasing for each employee. To isolate the total costs by line, usage, and cost per add-on item (taxes, add-on features, regulatory fees, and

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so on), create a spreadsheet in which each employee’s line requirements reflect the monthly costs for that employee. Run the items per employee line horizontally across your spreadsheet. When you have gone through all of the billings, total the fields by column for each item. This gives you the total monthly cost breakdown for the lines and items you are tracking.

An example makes this easier to see. I’ll show the costs for a small company with seven employees. The costs of their POTS lines and additional features is shown in Figure 11-2. Regulatory fees are outlined in Figure 11-3, and local and toll costs are shown in Figure 11-4. Their total MRC is $1644.

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Goodbye Centrex, hello VoIP-Centrex

The Centrex (Central Exchange) services model is owned and operated by the carrier. Centrex is physically the same as POTS; the line between the carrier company and your premise telephone service is the same. What is different is how and where the line terminates at the carrier end.

The lines run from the carrier’s switching equipment to each customer’s telephone. Figure 11-5 illustrates this model.

The number of lines needed for Centrex is almost secondary to the fact that the customer can terminate service at any time without penalty. Before VoIP, Centrex was a great solution for startups or companies unsure of their strategic plans because they could gain all the usual features along with POTS-equivalent telephony service quickly under a month-to-month plan. When the company’s plans become concrete, they could terminate Centrex and convert to a new telephony system.

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Goodbye KTS, hello VoIP

The third model is called a key telephone system (KTS). The KTS reduces a company’s total number of phone lines. In fact, for every six to eight employees, on average, the company leases only one POTS line. That means a company with sixty employees needs a mere eight to ten POTS lines. The KTS provides many traditional call features at no extra cost. Reduction in lines means cost reduction across the board.

The KTS is owned and operated by the customer. You use the same physical lines, with the same associated costs, as POTS or Centrex. The difference is where the line terminates at your end. The lines run from the carrier to your KTS. You then use your own inside wiring to connect your telephones to the KTS. A disadvantage of KTS is that the customer is responsible for all maintenance (including the inside wiring), for configuring the KTS, and for programming call features for each telephone.

Figure 11-6 illustrates how the KTS model works. With some KTS systems, you may need to acquire compatible digital telephones; you can’t just plug in any old analog phone. As a result, much of the cost of a KTS depends on the number of phones your company needs.

KTS was a good solution for smaller companies requiring more than fifteen lines. Now, however, KTS users can benefit by switching to VoIP because it gets rid of most if not all lines and uses the computer network for on-net voice traffic. If all of your company’s locations are on-net, you not only reduce the number of lines required but also eliminate toll charges. And, in most companies, toll charges are the largest monthly telephony expense.

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If your company has multiple locations, with each site having its own PBX, you can connect them all using a separate network, but the cost of maintaining a separate network is huge. If you have a great deal of recurring charges, the multilocation design for connecting all your PBXs can save your company big time. The recurring costs have to be leveraged against the costs of an entirely separate network. (VoIP runs over your computer network and does not require a separate PBX network.)

The PBX model provides great savings when compared to the other models, but it doesn’t give you anything close to the savings attainable through VoIP. VoIP all but eliminates services charges for all on-net calls. VoIP reduces carrier services charges significantly for calls that travel off-net. For many large multilocation companies, these charges alone amount to millions of dollars per month.

Unified Networks

The new term for combining a company’s telephony and data networks is convergence. A converged network is formed when all your data — including VoIP — travels over a single infrastructure. Another popular term for this is integrated networking. Integrated networks incorporate the use of computer data, telephony signals, and video signals onto the same network.

VoIP networking is about unifying the people that work for the company. VoIP, among many other attributes, is a unifier.

VoIP is not just about reduction of lines and carrier services charges, although these can be significant. It also adds features and functions that the company never dreamed of. As a result, VoIP enhances productivity. Use of the unified network increases productivity for the company and its customers. The following are two examples among many that could be provided.

Larry’s story

Larry is a Human Resources Specialist who works for a kitchenware manufacturer. His office is located at the company’s headquarters in southwestern Pennsylvania. Larry frequently travels among the company’s twenty-three locations, which include plants and sales offices spread out across the Midwest and West coast. He routinely conducts interviews with new employee candidates.

Larry’s company used to pay enormous toll charges, but VoIP eliminated a whopping 92% of the company’s toll charges.