Struggling to understand VoIP benefits -- help!

[kathrin]

Hey guys,

I been trying to read about VoIP lately but honestly still confused. I get its about making calls over internet instead of normal phone lines, but not sure what real benefits are there for a business. Some blogs say cost saving, better scalability, integrations etc… but feels a bit marketing talk to me.

I checked out few tools like RingCentral, Nextiva, Zoom Phone, 3CX and also MirrorFly (they got APIs & SDKs for chat, voice, video). They all look good on paper, but I cant figure which actually makes sense in real use.

So my doubts are:

1. Do VoIP apps really make life easier than old phone systems?

2. How exactly do companies save money with this?

3. Is there any hidden problem, like bad call quality or setup issues?

If anyone using these or can share some real exp, pls help me understand.

[aleclerc]

Hello @kathrin,

To answer your 3 questions:

1. Not easier, different. You have to be a little bit tech-savy if you want to implement it yourself (and increase the savings). Any person a bit on the technical side and able to learn so new stuff should be able to put things together. But for a business, maybe you want some help to start with. Then, you need service when issues come.
2. You pay per minute. You cannot imagine the enormity of saving you can have, let me tell you. It depends your current usage. Also, virtually unlimited lines (so to speak). In one usiness, the saving were about 80% per month I think. The other too. Both business were saving over 2-3K per year on phone bills (3 hard lines, fax, 800 number). Once voip, you still have to pay for 800, not much savings there, but then, the 3 lines count for a lot of savings, plus usage.
3. No hidden problems. I would say “different” problems, mostly related to internet stability, network performances, phone quality, initial setup issues. Once it works, it is quite stable. Call quality is often linked with phone quality, and codec support. You can have great sound, and poor sound.

So you need to have technical help or knowledge with network infrastructure and internet capabilities to make sure you have good results. You will need to buy phones that support voip natively (ideally) or buy “connectors” like HT802 to use traditional phones. (It is better to go voip directly, from experience.)

You also need to asses your needs, current usage, and calculate if switching to voip is worth it. Usually, for a business that had moderate use (like, 3-5 employees, 3-5 phones), the initial investment is all payed within a year to a year and a half. (From my experience.) After this is money in your pocket. Even at home, I have payed my initial investment within a year.

I hope this helps a little bit.

Kind regards.

[IntPlus]

I completely agree with @aleclerc.

The benefit is also a LOT more flexibility on the configuration you can do. You get all the features of a PBX without necessarily needing to install one in your business. You phone system is also completely agnostic of the physical location, everywhere in the world and with different ISPs.

[danc]

Well I switched to voip.ms from Google Voice about a month ago, because I was fed up with Google Voice’s inability to filter calls properly and the level of Spam (particularly for Medicare fraud). Switching was pretty easy and I was able to port my number. Now I’ve switched I can really see the benefits. For example I have imported my contacts (about 175 people) into the voip.ms phonebook. Now my contacts get through to me, whereas everyone else gets instant voicemail, or they can text. I love the Voicemail. It not only forwards the audio as an attachment, to myself and my wife’s email, but also does a pretty good job of transcribing it to text, so I can read it on my watch. Suddenly I’m getting NO SPAM at all. If I wanted I could add a special group of callers who could get me anytime, while restricting the rest to more civilised hours. Loads of control! When a call comes through it not only rings our house phones (which are hooked up via a little Obihai gateway, repurposed from it’s old Google Voice life) but also rings both mine and my wife’s cell phone and our watches come to that, so if it’s someone we know, you can be sure we’ll know about the call.

In short this is how 21st century phone service should look. If you have at least some technical chops, then I highly recommend you go for it.

[Jim_Raynor]

I’ve had 4 voip companies and all the MVNOs/ legacy landlines that exist and I have to say voipms has been the most frustrating experience out of any “phone company.” Unless you need their “features” their fan boys are praising I would consider another company if you just need to make and receive calls. Im managing folks who came from voipo (and that company although their CEO was a fraud and scammed lots of people from lots of money) was soo soo much simpler for the installer (me) and the end user (you and lots of old ladies). This company has everything cranked to expert mode so no old lady will ever know whats going on and when companies get big they move over to managed accounts were we work with IT depts and bigger still sales reps from the big V or T take over. So this is a very niche market their going after and it shows in their lack of UI and CS. There lots of companies for <$10 will give you unlimited talk/ text/ E911, when you look at their monthly fee and other fees^. The math doesnt math right. Unless you use your service very little or use work arounds (^fan boys /case in point) are doing and dont mind the frustrations of trying to get your phone to well place a call.. Then voipms is for you = Lots of frustration (google/ reddit it) Thanks for reading! Cheers

[sipper]

some of this may be incorrect because i am not a sip/voip expert

Buying lines can be extremely cheap. You can get 1 line for employee with a per minute plan for 85 cents a month for US with per minute billing in some cases and flat rates can be 4.25 in some cases with no charge per minute.

You can also create 1 line and have multiple employees be available. So you can order a 800 # (which is only slightly more expensive) and then have 5 people potentially answering it. This would also potentially be easy to scale.

You can create a digital receptionist and can have voicemails get sent to email.

Another reason to use voip.ms is if you are doing business development or inside sales and trying to reach people, you can literally just buy a local number to try to reach people in that local market if that helps get people to answer.

Many of the features on voip.ms are charged based on use, so it’s much lower fixed costs and variable marginal cost. That can help if there are fluctuations in demand. For a business starting out, it could be great.

Regarding quality of calls, it can depend on the quality of the Internet. Voip.ms is so affordable, you could really test the quality for a very low amount.

Voip.ms has a lot of features and can be used at a simple level or highly complex level. It depends on whether you want to learn about all the features. I am still learning about some features and don’t understand them all yet, but I am learning more of them over time.

It would really depend on how your business operates as to how much you could save. For instance, if you are doing sales of large items, and really need someone to answer, but don’t do a large volume of calls, you can get 10 lines for employees very cheaply and set it up so it tries to reach all of them fairly easily. Voip.ms has a great wiki to help and also technical support that is helpful.

The only downside is that if you are someone who does not want to spend any time learning this stuff, and if you don’t benefit from a cost structure that is highly beneficial for keeping fixed costs low while having more flexible marginal costs, there may be more simple options out there. However, prior to going with voip.ms, I searched and searched. The combo of features and especially the price are hard to match. If you have zero technical experience and no willingness to learn anything (like the type of person who would struggle follow instructions to change something simple on a computer) it may not be the best for you, although they have a new softphone App that may make things easier.

I have had technical issues using voip.ms where I had to contact technical support to understand what was going wrong and it ended up being due to configuration issues. If you just use the App they created it’s probably much less likely to happen, and this happened to me before they had an App.

[jl66]

Reading the initial message I thought it was about the benefit of VoIP in general, not specific to voip.ms or any other company. The question seems to have changed into the benefits of using voip.ms compared to other companies (possibly including non VoIP companies).

VoIP itself is certainly a cost saver over other “home phone” options. A landline phone at the end of a long wire from a telephone central office are expensive. The base monthly cost and taxes are just the beginning before paying for long distance. Most VoIP services include the entire US and Canada in their local calling area.

Land lines can also be prone to outages. My old residential landline (dumped in 2017) would break on a regular basis and the local telco would take weeks to repair the static or complete outage on the line. Business lines from the same telco would be repaired in a couple of days. A couple of days is a long time for a line to be down for a business. VoIP can be affected by an Internet outage but I have not seen the level of call quality issues that I suffered with my old telco land line.

Many people have a cell phone for when they are not home and that has become a popular option to having a land line phone. But cell phones are single points of service (like having one landline phone in the hallway of a home). Calling one usually gets you to one person, not their kid or their spouse. You have to know the number of the individual you are calling.

As for voip.ms vs other VoIP my experience is limited. The company I work for transitioned from old copper based facilities to VoIP (premises based switching) and we have had some issues. The company my wife works for transitioned to VoIP cloud services and they had more issues. If the business is already working in the cloud (more work at home than showing up at the office) a cloud based service could work. Our premises based system has a gateway that allows our work at home people to use the work system as the cloud instead of going directly to a phone company.

I find the voip.ms service to be robust and limiting. There are certainly more features than a simple plug and play analog device but there are limits if one is using the voip.ms server as a PBX replacement. Such as ring groups limited to eight VoIP members. I have not looked deeply into the other options (hunt groups and calling queues) but my impression is that if I wanted larger groups and more complicated call handling I would be better off buying a PBX and using voip.ms only for connections to the public networks.

Overall (separate from voip.ms) I prefer VoIP over other options and will be installing a system for my inlaws over the next month in their new home. Getting a wire to their home is cost prohibitive and the monthly fees are certainly better using VoIP. I will be using voip.ms as the PBX and phone company. If I were not available to set it up for them I might choose a different option, but I took a couple of my phones to their current house this past weekend and I was able to show them how the phones (Grandstream desk phones) worked and they liked them. Most of their needs are for calling room to room or being able to call 911 if needed. My general review of voip.ms would be “some assembly required”.

Connecting an ATA to a single voip.ms account and plugging in an analog phone should not be too difficult. But the instructions can be a challenge for people who are not already familiar with the technology or technology in general. But once set up it is something that can be used with limited maintenance.