For residential customers, PSTN switch off might just be an inconvenience. For small businesses, it could well be critical.
After all, customers need to be able to get hold of you, and you need to be able to get hold of suppliers too. A VoIP solution tends to be much more flexible than most legacy telephones, coming with a wealth of useful features.
VoIP stands for Voice over IP. It basically means that your business phones run "over the top" of your broadband, rather than your broadband over the top of your phone line. You connect your VoIP phones to your local area network (LAN), either via an Ethernet cable or potentially via wifi too.
We tend to recommend equipment from Yealink, who have an excellent reputation and range of phones to suit most purposes.
A good example of this is the T34W, shown below. This can have up to four connections to the softswitch, and can connect to your local network via both an Ethernet cable and wifi.
A VoIP phone itself can be set to show you which number a caller has used to reach you, so you can greet them accordingly.
Multiple phones can be added to a Hunt Group so that they all ring when a call comes in. If the person answering wishes to transfer the call to another person this is easily done.
You can also set up something called an Auto Attendant, should you wish. Most people know this as "press 1 for sales" etc, but it can also be used to do things differently when there is no one in the office or shop (eg at night and weekends.
