There are a lot of carriers now offering a hosted telephone solution. This is a great idea…….for the

carrier.  IP telephony opens a vast array of new opportunities for a company to do better business. The

technology that allows hosting is the driver for this, not the hosting itself. Hosting is not limited to

carriers. If hosting is a good solution for a company, privately hosting your own system has far greater

value for most businesses.

charge, the number of handsets, the types of features you require and your telephone call

charges.

· Maintenance free. All maintenance (except handset damage) is covered by the carrier.

· Multiple sites are treated as one large site.

owned equipment + line rental and call charges.

cannot do any “least cost routing” of calls through alternative carriers.

purchase the handsets you need to find another hosting provider or a PBX that is compatible

with your handsets. This will mean more setup costs, re-learning the new system and

downtime between one carrier decommissioning and the other carrier setting up. No wonder

carriers love hosting! They are locking you in very tightly, sometimes making it more

expensive to move than to stay.

simple. Features you take for granted now may not be available. New features that give

genuine business benefits may not be available to you.

short space of time.

office.

need to be turned over as often as computer systems. Typically a telephone system would

have a useful lifespan of around ten years. After three years you would own your own system

and the next seven would be payment free (other than a low maintenance fee to keep it up to

the latest version)

technology to bypass your carrier to make a cheaper phone call.

Some of the advantages of hosting in general (not through a carrier) are:

linked customer owned telephone systems also. Hosting your own system in a data centre

can lower the cost of ownership by requiring only a single system for the entire organisation

globally.

hosting your PABX, not your telephone lines.

Disadvantage of hosting in general include:

However, good telephone hardware that is not based on PC technology has a very high

reliability and this is not so much of an issue. If uptime is paramount, good hosted systems

will have redundancy options to avoid single points of failure.

office.

If you own your system, you can finance it and turn the capital expense into an operating expense.

When the finance period is finished, you own the system, so your recurring expenditure will drop

dramatically.

By owning your system, you have full control over the features and benefits the system provides. By

purchasing a powerful CONVERGED telephone system that provides solid integration into your

computer network, you will tap into features that will improve your business and through productivity

gains, lower staffing requirements, better customer call handling and lower call costs. You can change

carriers at a moments notice as your system is not tied to your carrier. Even if you are stuck in a

contract with an overpriced carrier, you can switch your outbound calls to a different carrier at any

time.

Carrier based hosting can be an improvement over an owned legacy system. This is entirely due to

the advanced technology used by the carrier, not the hosting itself. By purchasing the RIGHT

advanced telephone system, it can be demonstrated that you will end up with a lower operating cost,

far superior experience and better ROI.