Have you seen the phones in your office being plugged to the computer network or plugged to a wall RJ-45 Jack? Ever wondered why enterprises have moved to IP Telephone/VoIP systems instead of the normal analog phones?
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Over the past years, many businesses have migrated from analog phone system to a digital phone system (IP Telephony). Technology has advanced so much which brought about the introduction of Voice over IP (VoIP) which implies sending and receiving voice messages over the internet. Dial up internet connections has become a neglected kind of technology that no organization would want to deploy. These days many ISPs provide high speed internet services which can be enough to deploy a VoIP or IP Phones (Digital phones).
Digital Telephony system is more complicated compared to the Analog system, its more like a smarter kind of analog telephony, its more like a computer with servers, PoE (Power over Ethernet) switches , call managers, it makes use of UTP cables instead of single pair voice cable network. IP Telephony systems has become the basis of a converged network where both voice, data, multimedia and video applications are carried by a single computer in real time over the network. It carries both data traffic and voice traffic.
Most businesses make use of IP Phones because it offers a secure and quality voice connection, calls can be monitored and managed on their private network. VoIP can also be used for Video conferencing, for web browsing if linked up to the ISP. Also, some IP phones can be used to call outside the local environment.
In my office we have an enterprise IP Telephone system (Avaya Aura) which makes it easy to communicate within and outside the office. Our customer care services make use of VoIP and they can place calls within and outside the office.
Extension lines can be easily added on the go when need be, it makes it easy to add more phones as the office grows because network lines has already been created and mapped out, all you need is to connect the phone using a jumper cable, add an extension name and number and you are good to go.
IP Phones uses the same network as the computer, hence eliminating the need for creating a separate voice network hence its cost effective.
Extension lines can be added on the go, you don’t need to get the ISP involved.
Active directories, call transfer, call summary and contact list are all features in IP Telephony system.
Most of its software are open source, they can be downloaded and installed on a PC or Server.