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The current COVID-19 pandemic is shifting the way businesses work. Many companies have adopted remote working practices under social distancing. The transformation requires the corresponding adaption in tools and technology they operate with every day, bringing up unprecedented challenges for some organizations which have no experience in teleworking before.

When it comes to working from home, communications is the key to keep business as usual. However, those who rely on legacy phone systems and physical phone lines find it difficult to set up a remote working environment for their employees because their communications systems are inherently incapable of completing this task. With complimentary offers provided by some VoIP and UC service providers and vendors, many businesses have taken temporary measures to handle the situation.

While the pandemic prompted the transition, remote working might be here to stay after COVID-19. It requires serious consideration for traditional PBX users to plan a system upgrade to VoIP for the future. We understand that some of you might have been using legacy phone systems for quite a long time and are not sure whether a VoIP PBX makes sense for your businesses. We hope this blog post clears your doubts.

 1. “What are the differences between VoIP PBX and legacy phone systems?”

With VoIP, voice data travels through internet connections instead of plugging in traditional phone lines. That’s why you need to make sure of the quality of your network before implementing a VoIP PBX system. Though ISDN and PSTN network has proven to be resilient, it has significant limitations in terms of functionality, flexibility, and scalability. Many businesses who used to believe their existing legacy phone systems worked fine, have found it difficult to support remote working recently. What’s more, with the PSTN and ISDN switch-off underway, the clock is ticking for more legacy phone system users to consider IP-based solutions to future-proof their business communications.

2. “What additional benefits can VoIP bring to my business?”

In terms of functionality, VoIP PBX is way ahead of legacy phone systems. Regardless of the business size, VoIP PBX users enjoy enhanced communications features that would previously only be found in an enterprise-level traditional PBX. Some VoIP vendors include unified communications capabilities, such as chat, presence, and CRM integration, in their offering, making a wealth of communications channels into a single point of access. Besides, VoIP is an emergency-proof solution allowing you to ensure business continuity through personal mobile phone connections or alternate internet connections while it may take several hours and even days to fix the problem when a traditional phone service goes down.

3. “What equipment is required to use VoIP? What about my current investments?”

When it comes to VoIP, there is a minimal amount of hardware required to get started. Besides some IP PBXs deployed as the office phone systems without any analog lines, you can also migrate to VoIP without compromising existing equipment investments. Even if you are not ready for a wholesale infrastructure change or have a limited budget on a complete replacement, it is a good option to take a phased transition where you upgrade business communications to IP-based technology and have the traditional PBX integrated into it via VoIP gateways and analog telephone adapters.

4. “Can I keep my existing phone number while using VoIP?”

A phone number is an identity for a business. One of the most common concerns many companies have when switching to VoIP is whether they can keep their existing landline number. Fortunately, most internet telephony service providers in the market have the capability to port numbers with only a few exceptions. Though different countries have their own processes and porting requirements, normally, to move your phone numbers, you may need to reach out to the VoIP service provider about your port request and let your current landline provider know your plan.

5. “I don’t run a big business. Is VoIP right for me?”

VoIP deployment makes good sense for small and medium-sized businesses. One of the primary reasons is cost reduction because VoIP services cost just a fraction of an analog system considering the minimum equipment, eliminated internal calling fees, and reduced cost for long-distance calls. Cloud PBX is the other viable option for SMEs which requires no on-site equipment and installation. The service can be activated and you have a cloud-based phone system up and running within a day.

6. “Does it take a lot of effort for my IT staff to manage a VoIP phone system?”

Comparing to the legacy system, VoIP PBX is a lot easier to install and use, even if you are not particularly tech-savvy. With VoIP, your IT administrator can manage the corporate phone system from a web-based interface. It only takes a few clicks to complete many configurations such as adding extension numbers, setting up ring strategies, monitor the status of extensions, trunks, concurrent calls, and conferences, etc. A cloud-based solution also makes it extremely easy to add new users as the business demands grow.

7. “How to make sure it is well received by my employees?”

The IP-based phone system is very user-friendly. One of the biggest advantages VoIP brings to your employees, especially those who work remotely or are constantly on the go, is that it allows them to stay connected anywhere anytime. Most VoIP providers offer softphones to transform your mobile phone and desktop into office extensions so that you make and receive business calls with any device you prefer. So, instead of working 9 to 5, your employees can embrace greater agility outside of traditional business hours and locations and achieve a better work-life balance.

While adopting VoIP to address remote working needs at the moment, it is also a good chance to evaluate VoIP phone systems in the real world to see if it meets your daily business communications needs and plan for the upgrade when back to the office.

In a digital era of unified communications, what will traditional analog phone systems hold for your business? Is it the time to take a leap and upgrade to VoIP?

Not the great debate of the last decade, but something business owners will ask when buying phone service. To find the answer, you will want to understand the differences between VoIP vs Analog Phone System. You should compare the technologies on various criteria like technology, cost-effectiveness, availability and so on – so you can gain in-depth insights on how your choice will impact your business in the long term.

1. Technology and Line Rental

The essential difference between analog phone service and VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) is the way voice signals are delivered.

Unlike analog phone system – also commonly known as Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) – that carries voice signals over copper wires, VoIP technology transmits voice traffic over Internet in the form of data packets. This means that VoIP business phone systems need only a live broadband connection to make and receive calls. Expensive landline rental can be eliminated and replaced with much cheaper SIP trunking services. And multimedia support also becomes easy and possible with VoIP. Advanced VoIP PBX system could support voice, video, and any form of multimedia as you can do on the Internet, while analog phone systems that rely on copper wiring mostly only support voice.

But exactly how much you can save with VoIP? Here are some statistics to get a straight-forward insight. Research suggests that businesses save an average of 50-75% when switching to VoIP from a landline. Although prices for landlines vary by providers, it usually costs around £50/month (going high as £100 per line).

2. Features

Both VoIP and analog systems offer a core set of calling features, giving you the ability to send, receive, and route calls. But when it comes to advanced telephone services, VoIP goes far more beyond and usually comes at lower average costs.

Analog phone systems are built decades ago and hardly develop since the 21^st century. Scaling features with such legacy systems is largely in the hand of your providers, let along that some advanced features are simply impossible with PSTN and ISDN.

Modern VoIP phone systems, by the way of contrast, deliver much greater functionality at a lower cost. In addition to advanced VoIP features like Find Me/Follow Me and Video Conferencing that analog phone systems incapable of, Unified Communications (UC) also gives VoIP a huge advantage.

By integrating voice, messaging, presence, cloud sharing, and more in one single platform, a UC-capable VoIP PBX could enable your team to communicate in an entirely new way, boosting business efficiency unprecedentedly.

3. Cost

The total cost of ownership is often a deciding factor in the debate of VoIP vs Analog Phone System. As a business owner, you’d love to save on costs. Unfortunately, traditional phone systems don’t help you much there.

Here is an overview of the cost comparison between VoIP and Analog Phone System.

Buying analog is cheaper in the short-term but will lock you into a closed system that requires consistent integration efforts. And the total cost of ownership will only sour with higher monthly phone bill and recurring maintenance fees.

It’s estimated that small businesses that switch to VoIP reduce their local call costs by up to 40%, and international call costs by up to 90%.

4. Location Flexibility and Mobile Use

Analog phone systems aren’t just costing your business extra on landline phone bill. Its inability to deliver geographical flexibility can incur monumental business loss in the long run.

According to CBInsights in 2018, the failure to expand is one of the top reasons why 80% of startups failed in their first year. Many of its analyses suggest that these failed startups were out-competed because of their inability to break physical borders and offer labor mobility.

That sounds bad for businesses with analog systems and it really does. Dependent on the landline, analog phone systems limits you to a wired office phone. In order to make a move or expand your business to a new location, you will need to buy extra hardware and phone lines. Even a simple relocation of extensions will require rewiring a punch board by a professional. Worse still, analog systems provide little essential mobility features for remote and mobile workers to stay productive.

Things get different with VoIP, however. It delivers business-enhancing capability that legacy phone systems hardly achieve:

Easy Scalability: Expand your phone system without new costly equipment and wiring. VoIP is incredibly scalable and allows you to add or remove users/lines with ease.

Geographical Flexibility: Routing calls over Internet connection, VoIP removes barriers to communication expansion with virtual numbering. You can get “Global Local Number” from the country of your choice and make it ring to your VoIP service. This makes it possible for businesses to have virtual local presence anywhere in the world.

Extension Mobility: VoIP services usually offer a mobile app (softphone) that analog phone systems don’t. With such application, your employees can bring their desk phone with them via their own smartphone or computer anywhere anytime.

5. Reliability – VoIP vs Analog Phone System. What will Future Hold for You?

Word gets around that the one slight edge that analog has over VoIP is its reliability. And it’s indeed true in the past decades, as analog systems always have a consistent performance on call quality. But in the long-run, it’s NOT true.

The technology that analog phone systems rely on – landlines – are becoming obsolete and increasingly losing support. Many providers including BT (UK), AT&T / Verizon (US), NTT (Japan), DE Telekoms (Germany) have announced the discontinuation of line-based telephony. And the global shutdown on the ISDN network is estimated to come by 2030.

This means that the worldwide transition to broadband and IP services has already begun. Your analog phone system (landline) might be reliable today, but it may lose the edge in the next decades with less support.

In contrast, VoIP business phone systems, with continuous innovation and improvement, has greater potential to perform well for years to come. In fact, according to a new report from market research firm Global Market Insights, the worldwide VoIP market will hit 55 billion dollars by 2025, with 175% increase from the current level of $20 billion. And greater market size means greater investment and efforts to improve the technology.

Regarding the hype that analog is more reliable because the landline stability, as the internet technology continuously develops, that is the one to be clarified and adjusted. VoIP phone systems have well over 99.99 percent uptime (time in which the system is in operation). Broadband, 4G and now 5G are there to make your Internet stable and reliable which leads to improvement in the overall VoIP phone system.

The Bottom Line

VoIP beats Analog in terms of features, flexibility, cost, and reliability in the long run. That’s why businesses today are ditching landlines and making a shift towards VoIP.