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Small Business Phone System Plans Telephone System Features VoIP Support

Is your Internet Speed Good Enough for a VoIP Phone System?

Speedtest Internet for VoIP phone system
Speedtest Internet for VoIP phone system

VoIP Business Telephone Terminology

We’ve received a lot of interest from our cheap phone system offer and in the information we provide prospective customers we realise that VoIP technology and terminology can be very confusing for first time users.

It’s true that VoIP rates are cheap, VoIP phone systems are cheap and the capability of being able to move office and keep the same phone numbers (programmed in your phone system) is fantastic. The other features you can read about here: VoIP Services.

Broadband Internet Speed is Important for Business Grade VoIP

One of the most important things to understand is how dependant your VoIP Phone System is on your Broadband Internet Connection. There are several ways of testing the speed of your Internet service and you can even get a little nerdy and get to know about voice codecs to see how many conversations you could have at the same time using a VoIP system (concurrent conversations).

Learn more about testing your Internet Speed and how many concurrent calls that enables you to make.

Learn more about VoIP Business Telephone Systems

VoIP Business Telephone System Handsets

Small Business VoIP Telephone System HandsetsVoIP handsets enable your small business to take advantage of the functionality and flexibility of a hosted CloudPBX. These handsets can be located in remote offices like staff or contractors homes or even interstate or international offices.

Learn more about Business Telephone System Handsets

Business Telephone System Call Flow Scenarios

Business Telephone System Call Flow Configurations - smallestDo you want to see how most people handle the calls with their business telephone system? These call flow scenarios enable you to quickly choose from the most common choices and can help you get a good solution quickly.

Business Telephone System Scenarios

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Gateways & ATAs IP Handsets IP PBX equipment News Small Business Phone System Plans VOIP Equipment VoIP Support

What is an upstream provider?

VoIP and Internet Service Providers for small businessIn the world of cloud-based hosting and VoIP Business Telephone Systems an upstream provider is anyone who provides storage or switching capabilities. It’s really just another term for a wholesale provider.

One example could be your website hosting provider – they have a storage capacity that enables thousands of people to visit your website and many other customers websites and you rent a small bit of space from them.

CloudPBX Hosted PBX VoIP business telephone systemIn the world of Hosted PBX Telephone Systems we manage a call switching platform that is hosted at a Carrier-grade data centre and we connect to wholesale partners for Internet access as well as “switching” calls between carriers both locally via landline and mobile as well as internationally to landlines and cellular networks.

Each one of these providers is an Upstream Provider and they each operate their own equipment at a data centre.

It is important to understand that YOU have several upstream providers of your own. For example if you don’t use the Broadband Internet service of your telephone system provider (that avoids the public internet and connects directly with our VoIP platform) you are using what is called as the “Public Internet” and if something happens to your Internet connection it may affect your VoIP Business Telephone service.

Disruptions

An issue can occur with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) for several reasons:

  • They may perform an upgrade or an update to maintain, fix or improve their service and this may require the service to be shut down temporarily.
  • They might experience a physical calamity like loss of power or issue with the data centre building
  • They might experience a hardware failure of some computer equipment at the data centre

Resetting

When a disruption occurs you may need to do something on your own Router/Modem or VoIP equipment – like turn it off and then on again, ie. resetting it.

Hosted Telephone System providers work with many upstream providers (for the same services in some instances) and are able to redirect voice traffic from one to another as needed. When a problem occurs with one upstream provider we can re-route traffic to a different upstream provider and if that happens you may need to reset your equipment to ensure that it connects with the changed settings.

See your local IT Consultant

If you do experience issues with connectivity you need to make contact with the person who supports you and your local computer equipment. They will usually be able to troubleshoot the problem and deal with the relevant supplier (and speak their language).

See the advanced call handling features of modern Hosted Business Telephone Systems.

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Marketing Numbers News Small Business Phone System Plans Telephone System Features VoIP Service

The Importance of Tracking How People Hear About Your Business

Marketing numbers and call analyticsWe recently spoke to Angela, a freelance writer, to share her experiences working with some of the largest publishing and advertising businesses in Australia. If you are interested in media and more importantly how large and well known companies measure the success of their advertising dollar, you’ll find this quite interesting.

 

For a spell, I left the media industry to work as a research analyst where I analysed the efficiency of various advertising and marketing strategies for a host of clients, such as Qantas, Westpac, Coca Cola, the NSW Government, and so on.

Though my chief objective was to determine things like whether a thirty second spot in Packed to the Rafters would deliver a client’s TARP goals, time and again, I was asked how a client could tell if that thirty-second spot had resulted in more sales; something I was unqualified to speculate on.

To isolate this information, marketers would often suggest that clients advertise different products or special offers in each different medium they used, and then analyse sales data to see which medium outperformed the other. But becoming more popular is the use of a Voice Over Internet Protocol service (VoIP).

Unlike the former, which cannot control for natural selection—a person going into a supermarket and selecting Arnotts Tim Tams over another Arnotts product due merely to product placement, impulse or pre-existing bias—a VoIP rules out the possibility of natural selection.

Using different telephone numbers in different advertising mediums, VoIP allows you to efficiently and accurately track what marketing messages your enquiries are originating from; and importantly, a VoIP also isolates which advertising medium delivers more call-to-action.

You may use a variety of mediums—television, print, online, radio, outdoor—but of those mediums, which one actually drives a person to pick up the phone? What was the strongest marketing message? VoIP answers all of those questions with a simple text file detailing every phone call and the marketing number they originated from.

VoIP delivers something that as a research analyst I could never definitively answer: accountability. It’s true that VoIP is no substitute for a good marketing campaign, but when used in conjunction with your marketing strategies it offers a kind of clarity that TARPs and circulation numbers simply cannot.

To include Virion’s VoIP service in your next marketing campaign, sign up here.