Save money and install or upgrade to IP Telephony with Flow Telecom.
Replace rigid, expensive ISDN solutions with flexible Flow Telecom SIP Trunks and Hosted Telephony services.
In 2015 BT announced that they will be switching off the PSTN and ISDN in 2025, marking the biggest change in the telecoms industry for over 30 years. In Short, before 2023 you will no longer be able to order ISDN services and by 2025 you must have totally upgraded to IP telephony to avoid interruption to your telephone services and your business.
Around 40% of businesses have already moved over to VoIP systems, with more following suit every day.
Organisations can find their operations restricted by inflexible and costly inbound/outbound voice call services if delivered via traditional ISDN.
VoIP removes these issues, offering less cost per channel than ISDN while providing more flexibility for geographic telephone numbers, how and where they can be used as well as greater reliability.
The future or more accurately, the now of telecommunications is VoIP and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). VoIP doesn’t use traditional landlines to make connections, but instead enables both voice and video calls on a global scale using just an active internet connection. Making the switch not only makes calling far cheaper, but also makes it far easier to set up as there are no physical lines to be installed if there is sufficient connection in place.
What are the benefits of VoIP compared to ISDN?
Flow VoIP solutions are less costly per channel and more flexible in how and where geographic telephone numbers can be used. It’s also quicker to install and provision, as standard it delivers extremely robust business continuity.
SIP trunks and hosted solutions are perfect enablers to merge all your communication requirements together with a simple manageable strategy, such as email, instant messaging, voicemail, video conferencing, and every day telephony.
Can VoIP protect my business in an emergency ?
VoIP solutions can handle emergencies easily, they are disaster recovery/business continuity ready, allowing you to reroute calls to an alternative location quickly and easily.
What if we are moving office?
Number flexibility with SIP trunking means that you can keep your existing number, even when moving out of the area. This saves you costs on printed company literature and stationery while maintaining the perception that you still have a presence in the area you have moved from. Setting up new offices or working remotely is a lot easier as there’s no need for installing new lines.
Even better with hosted solutions as it can be moved virtually anywhere as long as there is suitable internet connection and means to power phones and in some cases be done by users saving on engineering callouts.
How scalable is VoIP?
Our SIP services can support connections ranging from two channels for small PBX-equipped businesses to an unlimited number of channels for large enterprises and contact centres. You can add lines and take them away at any time, SIP enables calls to be redirected to mobiles too, which can be great for remote workers or employees out for meetings.
Our hosted solutions go even further, they come with account admin access for customers enabling them to make required changes via web portal any time when in PBX environments changes are usually made by qualified engineers.
What if we want to add or remove some of our lines?
SIP trunks are valuable for businesses with seasonal voice capacity requirements where more lines can be quickly and easily implemented with no long term commitments, for example when running sales campaigns.
Conversely, if your business has multiple sites with ISDN connections into each, using Flow SIP Trunks you can reduce the number of ISDN connections that your business may have and also reduce the maintenance costs on all of your various PBXs. You could even leave a single PBX in a central office to which remote sites will connect in turn, further saving on maintenance costs. In which case at the remote sites you are left with just the cost of the IP connections and the handsets that you need. However, it’s important that central offices has redundancy built in should any connectivity issues arise.
What happens if our internet or power goes down?
Should disaster happen, you can use VoIP to minimise disruption to your business. For example, if your London branch has to close in an emergency and you need the calls routed to Manchester immediately, Flow SIP Trunks and Hosted Solutions can do this.
What’s the quality like?
From the moment we connect your VoIP service, you will enjoy all the reliability, resilience and high quality and HD you expect. We proactively monitor and manage quality of service for all our customers.
How resilient is SIP trunking?
SIP trunking is a mature service enjoyed by thousands of UK organisations and this alone is testimony to the reliability of SIP, for added reassurance while you switch to Flow Telecom. SIP trunking can even be used with existing ISDN connections to ensure the transition goes smoothly. Working with quality network providers means we can identify and fix issues faster through our advanced monitoring and diagnostic tools.
Can your business save money using VoIP?
One of the major benefits of upgrading to VoIP is that you can see unprecedented savings on your call costs. VoIP means running your calls via the internet which reduces the need for physical infrastructure and therefore, maintenance.
SIP trunk technology can reduce the need for dedicated connections as one single data connection can be used to carry both your voice and data traffic providing there is enough bandwidth capacity and bandwidth management mechanisms like QoS are used to control quality of service.
Ongoing telephone system hardware and support costs can be significantly reduced as SIP trunks are software licence based, eliminating the requirement to invest and pay support charges for expensive ISDN hardware line cards.
