There are significant differences between VoIP vs a traditional landline. VoIP has become increasingly popular as businesses have realized that it’s an elegant solution to a number of problems that plague traditional telephone services.

• Limited capacity: Traditional telephones services need to install the infrastructure for each landline at a location, which limits the number of phone users that are supported at any given time.
• Inadequate features: Because landline telephones operate separately from digital technologies, the hardware is limited to receiving, making, and recording voice calls.
• Outdated hardware: Analog telephone systems aren’t able to integrate with digital technologies, which leaves voice calls orphaned from the rest of a business’s information systems.
•  

VoIP offers a number of financial benefits when compared to a local telephone company’s service, but three stand out the most for companies with call centres, a large office workforce, or growing long distance bills.

• Reduced phone charges: Because VoIP uses the internet to conduct voice calls, it can establish connections to anywhere in the world without incurring the same long distance charges you would expect from traditional phone services. Calls made within the same service provider’s network are free regardless of the distance between the calls. For calls placed to different networks or landlines, calling costs are typically much lower than traditional phone services.
• Increased productivity: VoIP increases worker productivity by integrating voice calls with unified communications, cloud collaboration platforms and business intelligence applications.
• Better scalability: Traditional phone systems require equipment installed on-site to support the number of users at a location. VoIP can be scale up as a business grows much faster at less cost.
•  

VoIP can offer the greatest benefits to organizations that stand to save on large phone service expenses, are struggling with legacy telephone equipment maintenance, or are transforming their processes with modern technology. Here are some of the reasons switching to VoIP may be a good choice for a business.

• Lower cost: Long distance and international calls can become burdensome for national and global organizations. VoIP eliminates the premium that goes with long distance calls using traditional phone service.
• Connect multiple offices: A business that spans numerous locations across one or more countries can find that traditional phone service is a logistical headache. VoIP allows businesses to combine the phone systems of multiple offices of an organization to a single system.
• Broadband internet service: Most organizations have the internet infrastructure and bandwidth to switch to VoIP. Call centres might require an increase in bandwidth to a location, but VoIP usually doesn’t require major upgrades.
• Save on outdated phone systems: Traditional landline phone service requires costly maintenance of on-site equipment, and equipment upgrades are needed to increase the number of lines that are available. This maintenance is eliminated by VoIP because it uses the location’s existing local area network.
• Need for scalable technology: Rapid workforce growth can test the scalability of a business’s existing information systems. VoIP scales as quickly as desktop computers, mobile devices, or desk phones can be purchased and installed.
• Overcoming geography: Global organizations face the unique challenge of integrating teams spanning two or more countries. VoIP can make bridging the geographical divide much easier when included in a larger technology package for managing remote teams.
• Unified communications: Adopting VoIP also clears a path to a cloud collaboration and unified communication platforms that makes modern contact centres and internal communications more efficient. Because voice calling is a primary means of contact, traditional telephones prevent unified platforms from reaching their full potential.
• Managed VoIP services: Managed service packages like Epik’s offer all the hardware and software needed as a complete service package for a simple per-user monthly charge. This takes the headache out of switching to VoIP for businesses that want to avoid the expense of purchasing and owning VoIP hardware themselves.
•  

The drawbacks of replacing a traditional phone system with VoIP relate to the dependency of the internet technology that it relies on to deliver voice calls. In fact, the most common cause of VoIP quality issues is related to internet and bandwidth limitations.

Whether it’s the increased cost of electricity or the difficulties that an unreliable internet connection can create, VoIP does come with a few downsides. Below are some of the potential drawbacks to be aware of when choosing a VoIP service.

• Call quality: Quality issues that can happen with VoIP include excessive delays when placing calls, strange sounds, echoes, and excessive noise on the line that you usually don’t encounter with landlines. When these issues develop, they can be difficult to track down because they may be caused by poor internet service, insufficient bandwidth, the VoIP hardware, or the VoIP service provider.

  Many VoIP services have been improving their quality of service, but these issues often still linger when an inadequate internet connection is being used. For businesses without a managed VoIP service, troubleshooting VoIP problems can really cut into productivity and operations.

• Need for a power source: Traditional telephones are powered with electricity which is delivered by the local telephone company through a landline. Since power is supplied through a landline, they can function during local power outages. VoIP devices, however, use power from a wall socket, which means they can fail during local power outages unless emergency power is available. The need to supply power can also increase an organization’s utility bill as a result.
• Consumes internet bandwidth: VoIP operates over a broadband internet connection, so it will add a bandwidth load to your existing internet service. For large organizations, their bandwidth may need to be increased to accommodate the data usage that a new VoIP service will require. Many VoIP providers like Epik offer unlimited bandwidth with a set of fiber optic internet plans to solve this issue.
• Security: Another weakness of technologies like VoIP is the ever-present security risk of sending data over a public network. Many VoIP phones and Hosted systems are designed to encrypt the voice data they send over the internet to protect against malicious eavesdropping, but organizations concerned about the potential loss of privacy should examine security closely when considering a VoIP service.
• 911 emergency calling: 911 is part of the traditional phone system, and VoIP has not been required by regulators to offer a connection to 911 service. The need for emergency 911 service has led the VoIP industry to offer these services in most cases, especially for residential customers. 
•  

There are several ways an organization can optimize the benefits of VoIP. Here’s are a few ideas:

• Hosted VoIP solutions: Modern hosted solutions use cloud servers to provide the connectivity needed to manage a site’s VoIP service. Changing the resources needed for the number of users required is a simple process of adding or subtracting cloud servers, or changing server settings. It also makes recovery from hardware failures fast and reliable.
• Fiber optic internet service: Fiber optic internet services like Epik’s FIBERLINK allows organizations to operate their own private network that connects disparate locations to the internet. These dedicated network connections are managed and maintained 24/7 by the service provider.

  The bandwidth and reliability of a private fiber-optic network is much higher than standard broadband internet connections. A private fiber-optic network allows your VoIP data to travel securely and unobstructed, avoiding public internet traffic.

• Up-time guarantees: Uptime guarantees are important when choosing a hosted or managed internet service. With the advent of cloud technologies, these guarantees have been pushed as high as 99.9% by some service providers because they can quickly respond to outages and restore service with backup servers. Be sure to choose a service provider that stands by its guarantee.
• Responsive support: Another important aspect of VoIP service is the responsiveness of the customer support offered by the service provider. Look for providers who guarantee response and resolution times and who provide multiple channels of contact, such as online chat, phone, and social media messaging.