 Strategic Consulting for Broadcasters |
home |
|
Newsletter for Broadcasters
|
Save Money with Internet TelephonyAt Skywaves, we’ve been using Internet Telephony (also called “VOIP” for “Voice Over IP”) for about six months. We have a total of four telephone lines: one at the data center for our email-to-fax service, and three at home for the office line, fax, and personal line. The fax line is a standard telephone company copper circuit, the need for which I will get into below, but the other three lines are from Vonage, a leading provider of VOIP service. Each VOIP line takes about 90kbps (kilobits per second) when it is active. At home, we have a 384kbps DSL line, so we have bandwidth for about four VOIP lines. I use the Internet heavily, and we have a couple of backup servers here, so two lines represents the practical limit. With a typical 3mbps cable modem arrangement, you can have bandwidth for over 30 VOIP lines. The service is flat-rate at $25/month per residence number and $50 per business number. The best part of this is that there are no additional charges for long distance calls to the US and Canada. In an emergency, you could connect a transmitter in Georgia with a studio in California, run voice-grade service 24/7 for an extended period of time, and it would cost you exactly the same as if you never made the call. Our telephone bills have gone from close to $400/month to $75. One additional bit of flexibility is that you can have a number assigned to you that is local anywhere. For example, I could have a Washington, DC number even though I am in New Jersey. For this reason, you have take a moment to program your physical address into the 911 feature with the VOIP carrier. Thanks to the FCC, Local Number Portability (LNP) means that you can reuse your existing numbers. While we have been extremely happy with the service, it does rely on an Internet connection. When the Internet goes down, the phone goes off. This is not a problem if you have a dedicated line like a T1, but consumer grade services like cable modem and DSL are not as reliable. For that reason, we keep one copper telco circuit, so if all else fails, we can use that. It’s our fax line, and we rarely use the fax any more, so it’s on the least expensive telco service plan possible. But it is there in case the Internet feed goes down at a time when we really need telephone service. The bottom line: If you have a broadband Internet connection, and you are spending more than about $75/month on long distance calling, you should check out this technology. It is easy and inexpensive to get started with one line that you can use for your outgoing calls. Once you decide that it is reliable enough, you can add a VOIP line or two and start turning off those expensive telephone company circuits. |
| ||||||
