Toshiba Phone System

For a small business, what is better - VOIP or physical phone lines.. what phone system?

I am starting a small business with three employees. I would like to know whether it would be best to have a VOIP system or actually put in phone lines with a phone system. I will be working in the office and at my home at times while the others will be in the office mostly.

Public Comments

1. If you are starting from square one I would suggest you go with VoIP. There are fewer hardware requirements for a VoIP system. It is easy to have extensions in multiple locations if you want to have people "on-line" from home for example. It will be less expensive particularly if you are making long distance calls, and it is easy to scale the system to whatever size you need. Here is a page with information on a few different SIP providers you can look into: http://www.nch.com.au/talk/sip.html And here is a page with several useful software applications for managing your phone system: http://www.nch.com.au/phone/index.html http://www.nch.com.au/phone/voip.html Hopefully you'll find some of that information helpful. Good luck getting everything set up.
2. Just remember, on a VOIP service, if you lose your cable...or your power, you are out of luck temporarily.!!
3. your telephone is every bit as important as your front door. You want to make it as easy to access as possible, and you want it work when you need it be there. Nothing worse than a locked front door during business hours. VOIP is not always the best quality,
4. VoIP without doubt is the way to go, but it's essential to get a service intended for SMB's rather than home users. They are quite different services (see RingCentral). VoIP will not only be a lot cheaper than the traditional PSTN route , it should also include an 800 number, online fax, click to call, Outlook integration, call control ..... Most of the objections to VoIP date back to the 90's. You can get reliability figures from providers that are better than those delivered by your local phone company. Within a few years VoIP will be the only option so you may as well get with it now. BTW, when you get a power outage it generally means your in the dark, computers are dead (no email), photocopiers, faxes .... so loss of power is not a real objection to VoIP unless a business doesn't need power to continue operating.
5. with 4 lines you will not need a phone system... it can save you some money.. just buy some 4 line small business phones.. they are available in staples and other office supply stores... and have similar features to many phone systems... if you are going to need a fax line that should definitely be a landline... only having 4 lines you are a small business, so having redundant internet connections (at least 2 internet services) is going to be too expensive, so you will be relying on only one internet connection to keep all of your phones working.... the odds of 1 internet connection going down and knocking out all of your VoIP lines is greater than the odds of multiple landline phones going down at the same time... I would say it depends on how critical your phone lines are to your business... if you are able to go a day or two waiting for your internet provider to repair your line if it goes down with out phone service, then VoIP is ok... but if you need minimal down time then land line is a better option... also... if going VoIP get a UPS back up battery to supply your modem, router, and any ATA VoIP adapters....