Why use VoIP

Track-able Cost Saving:

It is the number 1 reason and we can save a lot of money using VoIP.

Moves, Adds and Changes (MACs):

The biggest way savings can be realized is through moves, adds and changes to the phone system which PBX people call MACs. The people in the data world usually don’t call them MACs as it overlaps with some of the terminology of the data world. 

MACs in the PBX would cost around anywhere around 70$ to 200$ per move, add or change and that includes moving a phone from cubical to cubical, adding a new line to PSTN, all of those are high cost changes and require specialized PBX people on staff or contract to do that. 

That range of cost per moves comes in because sometimes companies has on staff PBX people that would mean that cost would be a little lower although employing a full time person is costly or you might have a contract person come in and that would be high cost solution in short run. 

With VoIP these costs are virtually eliminated as we can move IP phones from location to location with little to no configurations on the Cisco site.

Reduce Wiring:

It is usually realized in new buildings, normally we have to add wires for every single set of network for example phone systems needs its own cables, data network needs its own cables or now we can run one single cable to every single cubical that we have in our building and terminate that on a wall jack and Cisco IP phones plug into that jack and then we can daisy chain the PCs in the cubical from the back of Cisco IP phone as these phones that built-in switches.

Reduce Telecommuter and Branch Expenses:

There can be a telecommuter either in a different city or country connected with the HQ and inside its home the telecommuter has a desk phone with extension 4123 that is part of the PBX system in the HQ and to do that we need to buy a Tie Line between HQ and the telecommuter location which has a reoccurring monthly expensive cost. And we need the same Tie Line if we want to connect phones between branch office and HQ.             

With VoIP all of these costs go away. If we have Internet/frame Relay/ ATM/MPLS-VPN connection between telecommuter home or branch office and HQ, we can connect back over to the central site. It is significantly lower cost than the old one (Tie Line).

IT Staff Consolidation

We can do more with less as the PBX people become the IT people and the IT people become the PBX people managing the phone system, it’s all one set of staff.

Application Consolidation

May be you have a hotel and inside that hotel you have an application for room service, one for hotel check-in and check-out etc. with VoIP You can actually consolidate these applications to the phone system. Cisco actually has a hotel phone package with which we can see menu, order room service, check-in, and check-out from the screen of IP phone without calling anybody.

Toll Bypass

Between HQ and branch offices and all the telecommuters all the long distance charges go away as you are sending all the voice data over data network where there are no toll charges.

There are also some cost savings that offer some benefits such as.

Soft cost Savings: 

 

Single inbox for Messages (Voice-mail/Fax/Email)

Using unity we can have a single inbox for messages meaning everybody has all their messages, voice-mails, e-mails, and fax in their e-mail. Unity unifies all systems of messages into one type. 

Extension Mobility (Save office space)

This is a killer feature in VoIP that allows people to roam around the network. Now-a-days people aren’t assigned phones anymore. Now employees come to an IP phone and login to it, it’s just like logging into windows where you type in your username and password and your setting and desktop will appear to you (which is called a roaming profiles in windows terms). Extension mobility is roaming profile for phones, where you login and your extension appears and you get all your voice-mails there and when you are done you log out. It saves office space as it allows people to share same cubical and phones. 

Internet Website Integration (Happy Customers)

 You have seen this before where you go on to a web site that has option “click here to chat with our representative”. When we click on it, it pops up a chat window. So with VoIP it is just a piece of cake to integrate that with voice where people can talk to engineers with a simple click through built-in microphones of their laptop using VoIP style technology. 

Open Architecture (Multi-Vendor Solution)

 When you go to any conference, you see people working on their laptops, you will see Dell’s, and you will see Hp’s, IBM etc all different kind of laptops all talking on the same network, why? How is that possible? The answer is that all the laptops use TCP/IP which is the protocol of choice the world has settled on. In the same way the world is settling on open architecture protocols that VoIP Phones use. So we can say the future of open architecture is going to be a protocol known as SIP, it is the TCP/IP of the voice world. 

It means that we can have a Cisco Call Manager or Communication Manager System that is installed on your network managing AVAYA phones and it is also tied into a NORTEL gateway that is connected to PSTN. 

All these three devices are communicating just like laptops because they all speaking SIP or they all using standard compliant protocols. This was impossibility in the PBX world because it was a proprietary lock. Whatever vendor PBX we buy, you need to buy their brand phones, and you need their trunk cards to the PSTN and you need everything tied to that vendor. With VoIP world, all that goes away with open architecture standards.