For a business, switching to new technologies or adopting new infrastructure is not always easy. Think of it as similar to transferring your office across state lines (or even to another country). There are costs involved. But then again, there may be benefits that can transcend the monetary value of doing the switch. In the case of VoIP, we earlier discussed whether businesses can actually save on costs with a switch to VoIP, and which particular business types are ideal for this scenario.

Hardware costs. Of course switching from a traditional phone system to VoIP would entail hardware costs. You would have to purchase your own gateway and VoIP handsets. And even if you have an existing local area network, you might have to upgrade your system to support the extra IP traffic brought about by voice calls.

However, consider that VoIP would also let your company save on maintenance and other set-up costs, particularly because your telephone units are no longer hardwired to the PBX by circuit. This means you can move around the office and still have the same telephone number. So when an employee moves to another office, there will be no need to physically move or switch cables. Or if you’re setting up new rooms or offices, you can even use wireless networking so you won’t have to rewire.

More importantly, using VoIP will let you set up remote offices more easily. You can have employees set up their workstations at home or even in other countries, and still have the same telephone number (this is very useful for work-at-home setups involving customer service).

Software. Switching to VoIP would sometimes mean having to install and maintain software, especially if you’re using a software-based gateway. This is not as costly as hardware, though.

VoIP packages usually come with unified messaging. This includes instant messaging, fax and even data transfer. In contrast, using a traditional telephone system would mean you have to have separate lines for fax, voice and data. True, sometimes you can combine these with digital subscriber lines (DSL), but you would still need separate physical terminals: the fax machine, the telephone handset and a computer. But with unified messaging, a single line (the IP network) can carry these. What’s more important is that you can use the same system to receive and transmit facsimile and even data.

Unified messaging will also make call management easier since everything is on one network. For instance, voice messages no longer have to be recorded on separate machines. Instead, these can be recorded at the VoIP gateway, and then forwarded to the users via email. Same with fax messages.

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