There are 2 types of VoIP – hosted and on-premise

The awareness of VoIP is growing rapidly, as you know from previous blog I spend quite a lot of time having breakfast and lunch as part of my working week, and 6 months ago when I asked if someone had heard of VoIP perhaps 1 in 10 answers were affirmative. Now it is more like half and many companies answer that they have just put it in.

It’s only when I dig deeper that I find that most have put in on-premise VoIP and actually the number who have even heard of hosted VoIP is very low and so it wasn’t even considered by their companies.

So what is the difference?

With hosted VoIP you, the company, buy the phones and subscribe to a switchboard hosted in data centres all over the country. You control everything yourself and have the flexibility to buy in help if you need it and change providers if you want.

With on-premise VoIP you, the company, buy switchboard hardware and phones and host the service yourself. You may control the phones yourself or your provider may do that for you, you pay a maintenance contract for your hardware and you are tied into a long contract. If in the future you want to change suppliers you may find that your hardware is proprietary so you need to start again.

Both have their merits and once you are set up as the user you wont see any difference but we believe that hosted VoIP is a more viable option in the current day. It can grow and shrink as your business needs change, you control your system and costs and the

Just as a matter of interest BT have recently announced end-of-life for ISDN and their way forward is a hosted VoIP solution so it is definitely is the way forward.