Modernizing Voice: What's Right for Your Business?

Tanya Duck, Director Product Management, Enterprise Voice, shares why voice modernization became so urgent, which options are available for businesses and why reliable connectivity is so critical for the new generation of voice.

Q: What has driven the urgency to upgrade voice?

TD: Covid accelerated the urgent need for flexibility. People were thrust into working from home, and antiquated legacy systems didn’t have the capabilities to support remote work. Voice Over IP (VoIP) is more cost effective because it eliminates the need to maintain separate networks for voice and data. Prior to Covid, a lot of companies were on the fence and had to overcome their fear of VoIP out of necessity.

Q: What are the options for companies that want to modernize their voice systems?

TD: There are two ways people buy voice. Some companies want a complete phone system, all the way to the desk. VoIP eliminates any need for hardware on site, so companies aren’t operating in a break/fix environment. All the functionality comes from our system. If we do an upgrade, customers get that upgrade. Key advantages include built-in business continuity and the flexibility to work from anywhere.

Some companies opt for SIP Trunking so they can build their own IP-based phone system and self-manage their own hosted environments. With this option, they pay a subscription fee per line rather than per user.

There is a third option that is specific to companies that are heavy Microsoft Teams users. Microsoft Teams Direct Routing leverages the Teams platform as a phone system. It is still cloud-based, but companies are only paying for dial tone as an incremental cost to their Microsoft licenses.

Q: Where are you seeing adoption of each option?

TD: The options typically depend on the sophistication of a company’s IT department. If a company has a solid IT department, it has the resources to self-manage and may opt for SIP Trunking. Companies lacking IT resources opt for a cloud-based, user-friendly solution they can co-manage with the provider such as Frontier + RingCentral or a UCaaS solution.

Another option is where they are heavy Microsoft Teams users. For example, a lot of higher education organizations, government and municipalities are choosing Teams. SIP is popular with multi-location, national companies that want to aggregate dial tone to a single data center and then distribute voice across locations. This option gives them a single point of management. UC as a service (UCaaS) is a big draw for the mid-market space.

Q: What’s the importance of connectivity for modernized voice?

TD: With VoIP (regardless of how companies choose to manage it), companies are migrating to voice as an application. That frees them up to spend money on services they really need – like data. Most business-critical functionality today is cloud-based, which demands more bandwidth. By migrating to VoIP, companies can free up the money for bandwidth to support the applications that drive business growth. Today’s voice needs good data, especially when combined with video.

Q: Any final thoughts?

TD: If you’re not ready to fully embrace VoIP, Frontier can deliver VoIP that connects to your legacy equipment, eliminating any disruption to your legacy network. If you don’t want to fully switch out your system, you can still use VoIP delivered over fiber. It’s a step forward without taking on a full switch out. When contemplating this type of upgrade, it’s important to find a trusted partner that can walk you through the options and provide expert recommendations. The right partner will help you find the solution that’s strategic for your business right now and give you a foundation to build for the future.

Want to learn more? Check out our blog: Frontier Voice Solutions.