Traditional landline phones come few and far between nowadays. With the exception of businesses, nearly everyone has a cell phone to remain in constant contact without being limited to one area. However, small and medium sized business phone solutions do exist to make your calling services more efficient and mobile. VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, in simplest terms, is a way to operate your phone systems over your existing Internet connection. When you place a call, your it is converted to digital data and send to the receiver online. This virtually eliminates the need for telephones, making working remotely from a computer easier than ever.

VoIP business can save a company astronomical amounts of money compared to traditional based phone systems. For new businesses, VoIP can cut startup costs by up to 90%, and small businesses that switch to VoIP can cut their expenses on local calls by 40%.

By operating your phone through a cloud hosted VoIP system, you save yourself the trouble of installation time and costs, as your system would be based off-premises. You can also install a VoIP system in your own office, giving you control over both analog and VoIP-powered devices. If your business chooses this approach, it is necessary to have a competent IT staff to manage the phone system. Cloud-hosted phone systems are much easier to manage (because you essentially don’t have to manage them at all). VoIP servers are secured in a data center. For companies with multiple locations, VoIP sevices can be unified and centralized.

Unified communication among locations isn’t just a benefit for outgoing customer calls, but also for internal communication. By unifying, companies save an average of 32 call minutes per employee, per day and 43 messaging minutes, because employees are able to reach each other on the first try.

It is predicted that by 2018, only 6% of the U.S. population will still be using landlines as a form of communication, and will have mostly shifted to advanced hosted telephone technologies, leaving the former left in the dust.

For small and medium sized business phone solutions, contact your local business phone partner and set up an Internet-operated phone system.