Is it the time to take a leap and upgrade to VoIP?
In a digital era of unified communications, what will traditional analog phone systems hold for your business?
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 Systems. 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.
VoIP vs. Analogue Phone System: An In-depth Comparison
1. Technology and Line Rental
The essential difference between analogue phone service and VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) is the way voice signals are delivered.
Unlike analogue 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 analogue 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). But most VoIP providers start their pricing around $25/month. The more phone lines your company require, the more money you will save with VoIP.
2. Features
Both VoIP and analogue 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.
Analogue phone systems were built decades ago and have hardly developed since the 21st 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 analogue 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.