Hosted PBX VoIP - The Right Solution to Improve Communications

Efficient telecommunication systems can make day-to-day business communications smooth and easy. Hosted PBX VoIP phone system is the right solution for small businesses to improve communications and draw more prospects.

Hosted PBX VoIP Call Features for Quality Customer Service

The hosted PBX VoIP phone system comes with advanced call management features such as auto attendant to handle all your incoming calls. It attends calls and greets the callers with professional sounding greetings. Further, the callers will be given a menu of options to reach the right extensions. The calls are routed to the required extensions of your office, mailboxes, conference rooms and unlimited depths of auto attendants. You can even customize the system to convey information about your products and services. Altogether, callers will get the impression they are communicating with a bigger corporate.

In case there are multiple calls coming in at the same time, hosted PBX VoIP phone systems serve as call centers. The call queues will be directed to the phone line of a group of sales or service agents in your office. The person who attends the call communicates with the caller. Therefore, there is no need to worry about missing any important business calls.

Communicate with Your Callers While on the Move

A PBX VoIP system gives you the versatility to work from any location, while efficiently managing your business calls. The phone system can be integrated to your existing phone, if you have a dedicated broadband connection. The web interface lets you connect to your home network, personal numbers or any number of extension lines. Even if you are not available at your office, calls will be directed to the phone lines where you can be contacted.

There is a customer portal incorporated in the hosted PBX VoIP system, which makes it convenient for you to view call detail records and billing information, listen to and delete your voicemail and upload music on hold. With all such sophisticated features, it is evident that hosted PBX VoIP system is indeed the right solution to improve your business communications.

VoIP PBX - AccessDirect's hosted PBX system comes loaded with features such as voicemail, fax to email, auto attendant and follow me call forwarding.

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Hosted VoIP PBX - The Right Phone System For Your Business

Hosted VoIP PBX is the right phone system for your business, especially small and medium business enterprises. Apart from improving your business communication system, this innovative telephone system offers benefits in terms of cost-effectiveness and improved productivity.

Hosted VoIP PBX Ensures Better Versatility

If your firm has offices at different locations, hosted VoIP PBX system can be of great help. It provides data connectivity together with voice service delivered over IP. The telephone system comes with a web configuration tool; all voice calls are transmitted over the Internet. Its web interface helps to connect any number of phone lines to all extensions of your offices. Irrespective of the location, all incoming calls can be easily directed to the designated extensions within no time.

Impress Your Callers with Standard Calling Features

The sophisticated call management features of the PBX phone system can impress the callers, and give you a bigger business image. The integrated auto attendant feature allows callers to hear a professionally recorded greeting and select from a menu of options. Incoming calls can be routed to the exact extensions, groups, mailboxes, call queues or unlimited depths of additional auto attendants. Apart from this, there is a live person answering system incorporated in this phone system, in which the callers get to communicate with a live person.

Save on Your Expenses

Hosted VoIP PBX system can be easily integrated with your existing phone lines. They are simple to implement; there is no need to install expensive and complex networks, hardware, and software in your premises. The phone system is entirely managed by the service providers, which again saves you considerable expenses.

VoIP PBX - AccessDirect is a leading service provider of hosted PBX phone system featuring voicemail, fax to email, and auto attendant.

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Unified Communications and Hosted VoIP for Business

Unified communications (UC) has become a popular term used to describe the vast family of technologies and organizational practices used to streamline communication. These include different processes such as phone conversations, email, video and Web conferencing, instant messaging (IM), voicemail, fax, and SMS messages.

Hosted VoIP allows employees to instantly access and reply to messages anywhere from any type of compatible device, making VoIP an important component of unified communications. This reduces response time, making every facet of your company run more efficiently. VoIP can be used for both internal and external phone based communications, and be combined with voicemail options that can be retrieved via PC browser or mobile device.

Hosted VoIP ushered in the era of the true telecommuting worker, reducing costs of setting up work-from-home employees by allowing them to tap into the company PBX. There is no loss of effectiveness, and overhead expenses can be reduced significantly in terms of office space and equipment.

Unified communications can be implemented in some way in nearly every structured situation. Even with limited budgets, there are things you can do to streamline your operation. From large companies to small businesses, non-profits to grass root campaigns, utilizing VoIP and leveraging other types of technology to facilitate real time communication can make any organization work more efficiently and effectively.

UC strategies allow you to be 'present' even when you're physically somewhere else. You can provide real time input and conference with colleagues throughout the day no matter what your physical location is. This 'telepresence' can be invaluable during times of crisis when you need to 'be' several places at once.

UC is also a valuable tool when you have several branches to your office and need team members to be able to communicate quickly and effectively. Mobile technology lets one team member access messages from home or on the road, while another team member is at their desk in a different time zone. This versatility makes it easier for employees with varying schedules to work together.

While many view unified communications as a collection of hard and software solutions that can be mixed and matched to suit the needs of their company, the term is also used to refer to best practices. Hosted VoIP can make everyone's workday a little easier, but the concept of real time communication goes beyond the actual nuts and bolts and concerns how you run your business.

Take a look at what modes of communication your employees already use both in-office and with customers (email, voicemail, phone) and how closely they stay connected to the office when away from their desk (mobile devices, home phones connected to the office VoIP system, fax). This will help you determine exactly how to unify your own communications to work in the most cost effective and productive manner possible.

Saiju is a unified communications and business software expert specializing in hosted business VoIP services and hosted PBX implementations.

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Hosted VoIP PBX - Connects Mobile Workers

Hosted VoIP PBX phone system keeps workers connected wherever they are. In modern-day business, workers are constantly on the move and have to even travel to international destinations. With a PBX phone system in place, a business can connect efficiently with distant clients and employees on the go.

With this phone system in place, your mobile employee just needs a broadband connection (DSL, Cable, or FIOS) to connect to your corporate phone system (PBX). Ethernet can be used to connect to their home network.

Hosted VoIP PBX - Stay Connected Round-the-clock

Most small business enterprises switch to hosted VoIP PBX phone systems to make their business communications smooth and efficient. In a hosted VoIP phone system, voice calls are converted to packet data. This web interface makes the call redirecting process simpler and easier. Calls can be efficiently redirected to multiple offices and mobile workers in an efficient manner. If you are not in your office, calls can be transferred to personal phone lines without any delay.

PBX Functionalities for Added Connectivity

The PBX system has special call routing facilities so that calls can be easily connected to your cell numbers, home phone or other given numbers when you are not available at your workplace. The main business office, branches, mobile workers and even international offices can all be connected as one unit.

Mobile workers can make use of the voice mail boxes of the phone system, which gives them the convenience to record their voice messages when their calls go unanswered. The extension dialing system, mailboxes, groups, conference rooms and call queues are some of the call management facilities that provide mobile workers with seamless connectivity.

Stay Connected at Minimum Expense

The VoIP PBX system infrastructure is maintained by the service provider and services offered to the business office at a nominal rent. The system is extremely flexible and scalable as the users can increase the number of phone lines across a greater number of users as their needs expand.

Hosted VoIP PBX system comes with a range of features including auto attendant, voice mail, fax to email and call forwarding. AccessDirect is a leading service provider of hosted PBX system.

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VoIP Must Overcome Challenges Associated With The 7 Communications System Layers

VoIP systems and networking systems are often alike as these technologies originate from legacy circuit-based telephone infrastructure. These communications systems have protocols and layers that govern their implementation. Among these specifications is the Open Systems Interconnection standard developed in 1984, which contains the OSI Reference Model defining the various stages that data must pass through when travelling from one device to another device over a network.

The OSI Reference Model layers

The seven layers - arranged for easier understanding on a two-set, top-down arrangement with each layer relying on the layer beneath for support while giving support to the layer on top of it - with their corresponding functions are the following:

Application Set

• Layer 7: Application - allows application to interact with the network for transferring files, opening web pages and other network-related tasks
• Layer 6: Presentation - takes the input data from the Application layer and formats this into a type that can be decoded by other layers
• Layer 5: Session - establishes connection with the receiving device, maintains the connection, and terminates the connection after the task is completed

Transport Set

• Layer 4: Transport - maintains data flow control from various applications and ensures error checking and recovery of data between the devices
• Layer 3: Network - determines the path the data will take and handles logical addressing and error synchronization to ensure that the data is correctly sent
• Layer 2: Data - assigns the physical addressing protocol to the data, and defines the network type and sequencing of packets
• Layer 1: Physical - defines the physical characteristics of the network such as connections, voltage levels and timing at the level of the actual hardware

The layers in a VoIP environment

Voice calls inevitably pass through the OSI layers even before the introduction of VoIP. The only difference is that users now have to contend with the various problems that may arise in VoIP calls, whereas these issues were the exclusive domain of telephone companies before. In short, users must now be concerned with call quality problems, packet routing, bandwidth allocation, and physical problems of the hardware and cables.

The roles of the layers in a VoIP setting and the possible problems that may be encountered in VoIP calls are the following:

• First Layer - electrical shorts in the cables and failure in any of the equipment along the way may generate static, latency and line noise in the Physical layer
• Second Layer - since a mere cursory check of the packets is done here, only minimal latency, jitter and packet loss is introduced in the Data layer
• Third Layer - the Network layer has routers that may introduce latency, jitter and packet loss as well as distortion in signals, resulting in volume discrepancies
• Fourth Layer - in the Transport layer, packet loss and jitter are likely to occur in sending of datagrams via User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and sending/receiving of media (voice) in Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), resulting in robotic voices
• Fifth Layer - VoIP calls are started with the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) in the Session layer, but it's Secession Description Protocol (SDP) together with RTP in the previous layer that are the workhorses that do most of the processing of the voice component in the transmission, and hence, they are susceptible to most latency and jitter
• Sixth Layer - the Presentation layer is where data is encrypted/decrypted and audio encoded/decoded using VoIP codecs and has inherent latency due to the delays in the conversions that must take place
• Seventh Layer - the Application layer is where the conversion of packets into sound occurs, which may introduce additive noise such as those from background noises or subtractive noise resulting from lost packets

In VoIP systems, it appears that latency or delay is the most persistent issue that affects call quality and it can be introduced at any of the layers. Thus, designers and architects of VoIP systems for businesses must use this information to address and minimize future problems.

Saiju is an IP communications and business software expert. He enjoys promoting VoIP and recommends finding great hosted PBX and SIP providers for a fantastic experience with this emerging technology.

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