Business Hosted VOIP is fast becoming the phone service of choice for both small and large businesses. Hosted VOIP, is also known as Hosted PBX, Hosted Phone System, Hosted IP PBX, Hosted VOIP Systems, or Cloud VOIP.  Basically Hosted Business VOIP is phone service using VOIP (aka SIP Trunking) to deliver Local, Long Distance, Toll-Free, and International calling.   The difference is the typical on-site phone system features are done virtually (in “the Cloud”) at the Business Hosted VOIP providers data center.  This eliminates the need to have an on-site physical phone system to handle calling features and routing of calls.

The benefit of not having an on-site phone system vs Hosted IP PBX are many. First would be the maintenance costs and upkeep needed on an on-site phone system, which also includes costs for adding as well as changing users and phones. These costs are typically included in the monthly cost of a Business Hosted VOIP service and are not extra. Another reason is the flexibility provided by a Hosted Phone System vs on-site, you can make adds and changes online to users, features, routing and not have to wait for the phone company or a tech to show up.  All the phone system features are virtual, including Hunting, Call Forwarding, Call Transfer, 3 Way Calling, Direct Inward Dialing (DID), Call Routing, Auto Attendant, Voicemail, and more. Also, since Hosted Business VOIP is virtual, the reliability and redundancy are already built into the service.  The likelihood of an outage or failure of phone service is minimal, since the provider data centers are extremely redundant.  With a traditional on-site phone system you have to worry about system failures due to power outages, lightning strikes, card failures, and software glitches, all of which can mean hours if not days of downtime.

As far as Business Hosted VOIP costs go, it is very much in line with traditional phone services such as ISDN PRI T1, SIP Trunking, Voice T1, Integrated T1, and Phone Lines.  The difference really is in the upfront costs, with a traditional on-site PBX phone system the costs are $2,000 and up, and that doesn’t even include the handsets - phones (additional costs).    With Hosted PBX solutions your upfront costs are minimal since the only pieces of equipment needed are the phones and a gateway or router.   Many of the Hosted VOIP providers will also waive the upfront equipment costs with a longer contract term.    Sound interesting?   See Hosted IP PBX Services.

T1 Residential Internet Services are typically used by people who work from home or run a business at a residential location requiring high speed T1 Bandwidth.   DSL or Cable Internet are not available so people look to T1 Residential Internet Service as an option.  Most Residential T1 Internet customers are located in rural areas and options are limited for higher bandwidth speeds.   A Residential T1 service is no different than a business T1 service, other than it is delivered to a home.   Like with business T1 lines, a Residential T1 line is delivered using copper pairs (aka Phone Lines) that are present in almost every building and home.   The local telephone company in your area will deliver the T1 circuit to your home in the same way they would with a business customer.   They build the T1 Line using existing copper pairs and provide a handoff of either an RJ-45 or RJ-48 phone jack connected to your T1 router or inside wiring (need Cat 5 cabling). 

Contrary to popular belief, a T1 line is available in just about any location, as long as you have regular phone service available.   There are no special restrictions on T1 Availability other than that.   Also, a T1 Residential Service is no different than a business T1 service in regards to speed, SLA’s, uptime, or features.   Residential T1 costs are also the same as business T1 lines, see T1 Line Pricing.   But since most T1 Residential lines are used in rural areas, the costs tend to be higher since the distance from a city or metro area are key factors in pricing a T1 circuit.    Overall a Residential T1 is the best solution for home users if DSL or Cable Internet is not available, as long as you are willing to pay the typically higher Residential T1 cost.

Dedicated Leased Lines aka Private Lines or Point to Point Circuits, are still a viable, low cost, data network solution. A Dedicated Leased Line is basically a secure, private, dedicated, data network connection between two points over a telecom carriers backbone (not over the Internet). The advantages of Dedicated Leased Lines are many, including high QoS, inherently secure (no encryption, VPN needed), very reliable (typically 99.999% up-time with SLA’s), with no fluctuations in bandwidth speeds (dedicated circuit). Leased Line circuits have been around since the 1970′s and have been the workhorse of secure, high speed, data networks ever since.

Many people predicted the death of Dedicated Leased Lines in recent years with the advent of MPLS VPN and its use as a secure data networking solution. But to the contrary, Dedicated Leased Lines are not dead and Dedicated Leased Line costs have come down quite a bit in the last 5 years. Leased Line pricing is still mostly based on distance between the two locations, so usually the shorter the distance, the less expensive the circuit will be (but not always). There are also a few options for flat rate pricing when the circuits are located within a metro or intrastate. In many cases it is more cost effective to use a Leased Line circuit to connect two locations than IP VPN or MPLS, see Leased Line Pricing.

Leased Lines also now come in a variety of higher bandwidth speeds (Ethernet Private Line), other than the traditional fixed T1 Leased Line or Point to Point DS3. Applications for Dedicated Leased Lines are many.  Some include voice-phones, video conferencing, secure data backup, Internet access (when connected to POP), and data transfer. So next time you need a good data networking solution, don’t forget to price Dediated Leased Line Circuits.