Business and Home Telephones and Systems

BroadbandFixit specialises in Internet telephony (or voice over IP) telephone products. We do not see much future for analogue based telephone systems – although we recognise that they will still be around for some time.

We help you to make practical use of Internet telephony whilst retaining your existing telephone line (or lines). There are many practical considerations so that you can make the changeover without having any kind of negative impact on your business. We can allow you try out the technology without any need to make any substantial investment until you are sure that it meets your requirements. If you wish you could just obtain a few of the benefits of voice over IP (for example local geographical numbers) to try it out.

Methods of using Telephony over the Internet

Single Telephones

An analogue telephone adapter. This allows you to connect any standard phone to your Internet based telephone service.

This analogue telephone adapter allows you to connect two telephones, each with its own separate telephone numbers. The adapter is configured to allow connection to an Internet based telephony provider such as Voiptalk.

We will help to get this configured and working for you in conjunction with your existing Internet connection. You do not need your computers to be switched on. Telephone calls are made in the usual way.

There are various types of router that provide analogue telephone ports.

The model shown here allows connection to the Internet through ADSL, and to your telephone line. This means that you plug your telephone to the router, and you can call using voice over IP or the BT landline. For example, if you dial 999 it can be programmed to dial 999 through the BT line. Similarly if there are incoming calls from the BT line the phone will ring just as they will of a call comes in from the Internet.

This is useful when you want to make full use of the Internet to make phone calls, but do not wish to add additional telephones around the house or office. Another application is to use it in conjunction with an existing analogue telephone system. We will help make the connections between the router, BT line and analogue phone system. Also we will set up the Internet telephony for you.

An IP Telephone is a completely separate telephone that connects to the Internet.

Like a telephone adapter it allows you to make and receive calls in the normal way. There are additional benefits:

• Multiple lines – you can have say four lines configured on the phone all with different telephone numbers and providers
• It is standards based with full features that is designed to connect to any IP telephone system. Non IP phone systems use proprietary phones that are expensive – as they do not comply with standards
• Better sound quality than analogue telephone adapters
• Can use on the Internet today, and in the future it can be used with an IP based telephone system

Telephone Systems

Internet based telephone systems provide the following useful features:

• Connect internal telephone calls within the company
• Route calls over the most cost effective provider
• Route 999 calls and directory enquiry calls over BT as these are not easily supported by voice over IP
• Route incoming calls from specific lines to pre–defined extension telephones
• Voice mail – at no extra cost
• Call logging – at no extra cost
• "Hot desk" so that an employee can sit at any desk and his calls will be routed to him. He only needs to tell the phone who he is

If you already have a telephone system and you want to explore the feasibility of IP telephony for your company, you can start off in a number of ways:

• Buy an IP telephone that is totally independent and separate from your existing analogue phone system
• Buy an AVM box that will allow a single BT line and Internet telephone service to be routed to your analogue phone system. All that needs to happen is to connect the chosen phone line to the AVM box instead of BT. Both BT and Internet phone calls will arrive at the analogue phone system
• Use an analogue telephone adapter to connect up to two Internet lines to your analogue telephone system. This makes sense when you know that you have two spare analogue line ports on the phone system
• If your telephone system is ISDN based and has no analogue lines, then it is easier to use a separate IP telephone to find out if voice over IP is for you or not. Voice over IP can be added to the phone system as we can provide a special gateway to connect to the ISDN connection. This connects to BT and the Internet telephone provider at the same time.

Changing to a Voice over IP telephone system

Because of ongoing costs it is often cheaper to change to a voice over IP based phone system and retain a small number of BT lines. We recommend that you retain BT lines as you need communications even when the Internet goes down. Due to its complexity the Internet will inevitably go down from time to time. You cannot afford to lose phone communications as well.

Today there are two markets for Internet base phone system.

They are:

• Traditional providers who need to retain their high prices and therefore provide IP telephony as an add on
• New IP based phone systems that were designed with IP telephony in mind

IP phone systems offer the advantage that all extras are included in the price. For example voicemail, call logging and interactive voice response.

We support IP Cortex telephone systems as they work with all voice over IP phones and analogue telephone adapters. http://www.ip-cortex.co.uk They are also very cost effective when compared to traditional telephone systems. The IP Cortex system is capable of automatically configuring a wide range of IP phones and analogue terminal adapters.

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