It’s a golden rule to save on costs wherever possible, and nowhere is that more important in the current climate than for today’s small and home businesses. If you can make any potential savings for the start of the New Year, this will help your company considerably in commencing 2011 with some degree of security.
One of the areas in which you can make cost savings is by replacing your phone service. Many home offices simply use a landline, but getting an additional line put in can be expensive, not to mention that extensive calling can soon run up a hefty bill with most landline providers. The costs increase as well if your caller base includes international customers or suppliers: just one hour of overseas calls a day can make a significant dent in the budget.
If you change over to a voip internet system, you not only get the option of making free calls to another voip phone anywhere in the world, but you can also call landlines and international numbers at a much cheaper rate. Some of the business packages you can get from voip providers will even have provision to call certain areas for free. Your internet softphone installation can reside on an office computer, or you can add a headset to your laptop and have a mobile office system that travels wherever you go, giving you a truly portable solution.
One of the perceived disadvantages of voip is that as you need a PC to run it you are dependent on a power supply. This isn’t so much of an issue now that most have a mobile, and to be perfectly honest most large scale landline systems require powered handsets which will die in the same circumstances. If your computers are lacking power you probably have more pressing worries than being able to make free phone calls. Another requirement is a broadband connection. You should be looking to get as high a bandwidth connection as you can just for the sake of your business anyway, but that extra speed will let the voice quality remain clear and legible when you use the phone without other data flow interfering. Despite the perceived problems of voip, these are more than matched by the benefits it provides and the real savings that can be made on calls via a the various voip phone plans available.
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