Category: News

BT recently announced a reprieve for our old-fashioned telephone lines, but not for long. Businesses can continue to buy ISDN lines until 2023, but they will still be obliged to migrate to VoIP in 2025. Up to a million households still have a landline but no internet or mobile but they too will be moved onto some form of VoIP router by 2025.

The end is definitely nigh for a telephone system that has been in use since 1876. VoIP is simply better and cheaper to operate.

How are they different?

The original Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) established a call by devoting a succession of circuits to the current that carried your voice from phone to phone. The ISDN services (Integrated Services Digital Networks) provided to many businesses are still dependent on the same wired telephone circuits. In contrast, VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) digitises communications and routes them across the internet through an SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) trunk provider.

Why is VoIP a more cost effective solution?

A major overhead of ISDN (and singe line PSTN) is its dependence on that old wired network. Longer distance calls mean more circuits have to be devoted to the call, making them expensive. More phones need more lines that still cost money when they aren’t in use. That makes growing your operations wasteful and costly. ISDN equipment is also expensive, whereas VoIP handsets are a minor outlay.

In contrast, the internet is available (almost) everywhere, and has more than enough capacity to carry voice calls. Using the internet, the physical distance between connected parties becomes irrelevant. In fact, neither requires a fixed location – both can be roving. Additional numbers don’t need additional hardware.

Does ISDN have any advantages?

Conventional landlines carry a current independent of the electricity grid so even in a power cut you could still make a call. These days you would probably fall-back onto your mobile phone, but ISDN and landlines are also independent of the internet, so a problem with your broadband won’t cut off your phones. Despite the availability of mobiles, some businesses are reluctant to put all their eggs in one basket.

On the other hand, you can make VoIP calls using a mobile phone or laptop microphone if you need to, and you can maintain a backup broadband connection or a wifi hotspot.

The irresistible benefits of VoIP

Extending and contracting your telephone capacity is easy when you use VoIP. You can easily relocate to new premises, connect new sites and provide access to out-of-office employees. You can provide customers with cheap local calls no matter where they live. You can record and archive important calls, re-route them to other desks and merge your telephony into a unified communications system. Digital communications make it far easier to provide video-conferencing and other collaboration tools to your in-house and home-working staff.

VoIP will also make it much easier for local firms to go national – because both incoming and outgoing calls can be charged at cheap local rates.

Change is now inevitable, so if you haven’t yet made the switch you should consider it today with Andromeda Solutions.

You know your business relies on its computers, but how well do you know the machines? Can you fix them, restore network connections, repair corruption, defend them from hackers or, most importantly, understand the many new things they could do for you?

It is difficult for any in-house IT department to master every skill that falls under the umbrella of “information technology”. IT department development is itself restrained by the burden of daily routines. Typically, the workload of in-house IT departments is dominated by mundane chores such as website updates, OS repairs, cabling, backing up, installing patches and server administration. Few have staff to spare for creative tasks like software development, digital marketing or business transformation.

Yet nobody understands your business and its potential better than your own staff. Free your IT personnel from chronic problems and you can liberate them to help develop your enterprise. You build an agile in-house team, outsource the most specialised challenges – such as maintaining cutting-edge security, and also the most routine – including backup routines.

Choosing the best local IT services:

Establishing a strong partnership with an external service provider is always important, but never more so than in IT. If you outsource payroll, staff soon start complaining at the end of the month if their wages aren’t right, but when you outsource IT, an uncorrected error could stop your operations today. So, how can you ensure your provider understands your priorities?

Using local IT services means that you can invite them to visit and see how you work. It is often easier to convey your concerns and ambitions in a face-to-face. For the same reason, it helps to choose a local IT services provider that is neither too big nor too small for the scale of your own operations. IT companies in your own area are more likely to share your passion for success.

Preparing to outsource IT:

Before you ever dial a number or meet a rep, there are two things you should do. The first is to clearly itemise all the targets you want to achieve from your IT resources. The second is to research the companies in your area willing to provide it.

Itemising your objectives:

Your list, or lists, should include both your routine performance targets and your longer-term ideas for applying new information technologies.

Routine requirements might include reliable automated backups, easy data restoration, improved document control, effective spam filtering and rapid repair callouts. If you can set specific performance targets, all the better.

Your development objectives may include migrating to Office 365, integrating VoIP telephony into a new CRM system, developing an e-commerce shopfront, or providing collaboration tools that will enable remote outworking.

Vetting local IT services providers:

Every point you have listed now suggests a useful question to ask your prospective provider. A great IT team soon reveals its genuine interest in your business by making creative suggestions that will help you advance those plans. Even if your primary objective is to delegate laborious routines, an IT service provider happy to volunteer advice is worth its weight in gold.

Of course, check their customer service reviews, professional accreditations and contract small-print, but always remember – you are looking for an IT partner not just a utility.

Last week we were called out to a new customer due to concern regarding their current back-up state. After checking their systems we found they were not using any actual backup apart from saving to a local computer. This was all unbeknown to the user of that specific machine. Should this computer fail, all company files would have been lost.

How we Helped

Having come across similar situations previously, we have partnered with VEEAM and other companies, ensuring our customers are not left in such predicaments. VEEAM is an excellent backup system for Cloud, Virtual and Physical systems. Our team ensures the best levels of IT Security, keeping company data safe at all times.

Whether using VMware, Hyper-V, AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, Office 365, Windows or Linux, we have a system to suite your needs. If you are looking for a backup system that is simple, flexible, reliable and trusted by 365,000 customers worldwide, let us know.