Small business phone systems on the NBN: VoIP or traditional?

For years, small businesses weighed up whether to swap a traditional phone system for VoIP. That decision has mostly been made for you. The copper network that traditional systems plugged into has been switched off. Whichever system you use, your calls now travel over your internet connection.

We recommend replacing an old system with new desk phones or softphones, and we install both. A softphone is a phone app on your computer or mobile. You can keep the old system and connect it to the NBN with a gateway, but it is not what we recommend.

What a traditional system is now

A traditional business phone system is usually a PABX: the box on the wall or in the comms cupboard that runs your extensions and handles hunt groups and transfers. It was built for copper phone lines.

It can still be made to work on the NBN. A gateway sits between the old system and your internet connection, translating between them so your handsets and extensions work as before. Caller ID stays too. You are changing the connection, not the system.

A VoIP system does the same job in software. It runs in a data centre, which is what hosted means, or on a small server in your office. Its IP handsets plug into your network rather than a phone socket.

Why we recommend new phones

A gateway lets you keep your existing system, including its handsets, features and limits. As a system nears the end of its life, it can become harder to maintain, and faults can take longer to fix when parts are hard to find. Paying to keep a system running when it frustrates everyone is a false economy.

If you still prefer to keep your current system, we can connect it with a gateway.

Where a VoIP system makes the biggest difference

A VoIP system makes the biggest difference when the way you work has changed. Common signs in a small business include:

• staff take calls away from their desks, at home or on the road
• calls go unanswered because nobody can see who is free
• every new starter means a technician visit
• you have no idea how many calls you miss

On a current VoIP system, the system can ring a desk phone and a mobile at the same time, and voicemail arrives by email. Adding a person takes a settings change rather than a new cable. Our page on phone systems for small business covers what a small business actually needs and what tends to get sold on top.

Lines become calls at once

Small businesses often think in lines: two lines or four, with a hunt group that rolls to the next free one. A VoIP system has a set number of calls it can carry at once. That number is a setting.

Count the calls. Ten staff who are rarely on the phone may need fewer calls at once than three who are on it all day.

Your connection and your office network

Your NBN connection type and upload speed decide how many calls you can run cleanly at once, so know them before you choose. And when calls sound bad after a move to the NBN, the cause is usually the network inside the building, not the NBN itself.

Check what else was on the old line

Alarms, lift phones, EFTPOS terminals, fax machines and back-to-base monitoring often shared the old copper service. Each needs to be dealt with separately from the phones. These are the things most often forgotten in a changeover, so list them before you order anything.

Keeping your numbers

You can almost always keep the numbers you advertise. The new provider requests the move with your written authorisation.

Your account details must match your current provider's records exactly. Take them from a recent bill rather than from memory. Our page on business VoIP systems explains how porting works.

Before you get a quote

A quote given without knowing what you have now is a guess. Our NBN phone systems page explains how your connection type affects calls and lists what to have ready before you ask anyone for a price. Or tell us what you have now and we will quote for the desk phones or softphones to replace it.