Business VoIP systems in Australia

VoIP stands for voice over internet protocol. It means your calls travel over your internet connection rather than over a dedicated phone line.

That sounds like a technical detail and it is not. It changes three things about how a phone system behaves:

• The system stops being a box in a cupboard. The intelligence that answers, routes and transfers calls runs on a server rather than on hardware in your building. It can sit in a data centre, or on a machine in your office if you prefer.
• A handset is just a device on the network. Plug one in at a second site, or at somebody's home, and it behaves exactly as it does at the front desk. Same extension, same transfer, same directory.
• Adding a line stops being a phone company job. Capacity is a setting rather than a physical cable, so ten handsets becomes fifteen without anyone visiting.

For most businesses the practical result is one phone system across every location and every mobile, instead of a separate system per site.

This is the most common objection to VoIP and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassuring one.

A handset on your desk needs power. Most desk phones draw power over the network cable from a switch in the comms cupboard. If that switch loses power, the phone goes dark. Your internet connection needs power too, so the modem and router stop as well.

The part people expect to be bad news is actually the good news. Because the phone system itself is not in your building, a power cut at your office does not take the system down. It only takes down the handsets. The system keeps answering, and it can be told to send every call straight to a mobile the moment the handsets stop responding. Callers hear a person, not a dead line.

An old phone system in a cupboard cannot do that. When the power goes, the whole thing goes, and the calls go nowhere.

Where the "landlines kept working" belief comes from, because it is not wrong, it is just about a service that is going away. An analogue line on copper drew its power from the telephone exchange rather than from your building, so a single corded handset kept working in a blackout. For most Australian businesses that copper service has already been switched off as part of the NBN rollout, so it is not the fallback it used to be, whichever phone system you choose.

What we actually do about it:

• A small UPS on the modem, router and network switch. This is the cheap one and it is the one most businesses skip. It keeps the phones alive through the short outages that make up most of them.
• A failover rule that diverts calls to nominated mobiles automatically if the handsets stop registering. Set up once, works without anybody doing anything on the day.
• Mobile data backup on the router, where losing calls matters enough to justify it.

Worth being clear that the first one is not expensive and it solves most of the problem.

Call dropouts and one way audio are the most common complaints on existing VoIP installations, and the cause is nearly always the network rather than the phone system.

The things worth checking, roughly in order:

1. Upload speed, not download speed. Every time somebody speaks, the system is uploading. Connections sold on their download figure can be poor for calls even when they feel fast.
2. Whether the phones share the connection with everything else. A large file upload competing with a call will win unless the network is configured to give voice priority.
3. The cabling. Data cabling installed properly once will not be a problem again. Cabling that was extended by somebody in a hurry will keep producing faults that look like phone faults.
4. Firmware. Handsets and phone systems are software and they get updates. Most manufacturers publish them free, and a phone that has not been updated in three years is a reasonable first suspect.
5. The firewall. Calls that connect but have no audio are usually firewall or routing behaviour rather than a broken phone.

If you have an existing system doing any of this, we will look at it with you. Diagnosing somebody else's installation is ordinary work.

The old page promised this and never delivered it, so here it is properly.

1. You authorise the move. Porting is requested by the gaining provider, which is us, on your written authorisation. You do not contact your current provider to start it.
2. The details have to match the losing carrier's records exactly. Account name, account number and service address, taken from a recent bill rather than from memory. Mismatched details are the single most common reason a port is rejected, and it costs days rather than minutes.
3. Simple ports move quickly. A single number with nothing unusual attached is a short process. A number that is part of an indial range, sits on a business line bundle, or is tied to other services is a complex port, and complex ports are scheduled rather than immediate.
4. The handsets are usually ready before the number moves. We install and test the new system while your existing numbers are still answering the old way, so nothing depends on everything happening at once.
5. The cutover itself is quick, and it is scheduled for a time that suits you rather than the middle of a Tuesday morning.

The one thing not to do, and it is the mistake that loses numbers. Do not cancel your existing service before the port has completed. Cancelling releases the number back to the carrier, and once it is released it may not be recoverable. Let the port close the old service.

If you are not sure what you have, send us a recent bill and we will tell you what can move and what cannot.

Pricing depends on how many handsets you need, whether you are keeping existing hardware, and how many numbers are moving. It is a short conversation rather than a form.

What we can say generally: calls between your own sites and handsets do not cost anything, because they never leave the system, and most businesses moving off older line rentals find that alone accounts for a lot of the difference.