Until recently, small businesses had no other real alternative to the traditional phone system, often screwed to a wall in the corner of the office and linked to traditional BT connections, usually digital ISDN lines. However, today a technology called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has become a viable solution for even small companies since broadband internet access has become more affordable and popular among small businesses. VoIP is a revolutionary technology that provides inexpensive voice communications and can be used in more than one location, offering the chance to provide 'joined up' telecoms at an affordable price.

How can VoIP Save You Money?
VoIP offers many benefits and useful features over traditional telephony. The most significant benefit is that it brings together all of your companies users into a single system and a single point of billing. This means you no longer need to worry about individuals claiming for call expenses each mon... Read more »

As the world seems to grow smaller each day, at least in a virtual sense, the forward thinking and global telecommunications company will have a firm grasp on the intricacies of call termination. With this technology and knowledge, such a company will be able to offer, and support its clients with top notch connections in a fraction of the time. The technology that is involved in VoIP continues to expand and the process continues to be streamlined on an almost daily basis.

Successful Telecom Companies Embrace Innovations

In order to stay competitive in the VoIP field, it is necessary for a company to not only stay abreast of the latest innovations, but to create some of those innovations themselves. It is not good enough to simply implement the research and products of other companies, it is also necessary to break new ground and push the technology envelope to continuously expand to avenues that seamlessly deliver all calls put through a company'... Read more »

Traditional fax machines have always posed a bit of a problem for VoIP networks. This is because VoIP technology encodes analog sound in a specific manner for transmission. Fax on the other hand requires another method of encoding which doesn't work seamlessly with existing VoIP equipment. There are many ways of getting over this limitation and we take a look at some of them as well as fundamental changes in the fax industry.

Connecting Regular Fax machines to VoIP

A new standard has been developed for encoding fax signals called T.38. Devices which implement this protocol allow a fax to be sent over the VoIP network without any problem. Now either a fax machine itself can be Internet aware - also called IAF or "Internet Aware Fax" - or a device can be attached that converts the analog signals from a regular fax machine into the format required by T.38. But even this isn't enough by itself. To handle the fax signals properly, even the Vo... Read more »