Saving money with VoIP
When I moved into the role of managing the network and telecommunications at work, I was quite surprised with the volume and cost that long distance calls were costing our company. At the worst we had a bill of nearly $300 on long distance calls alone. The business being regional based was the main contribution to this as most of our clients are based in the capital cities.
This got me looking down the path a VoIP solution to see if the technology was good enough to use in a business environment. Due to our old phone system (more on that later 
) only having ISDN, I first started it off with a more “crude” implementation.
We obtained a VoIP ATA (Linksys PAP2) and portable phones.
We choose MyNetFone as our VoIP provider which gave us 2 VoIP lines and 250 Free National VoIP calls all for $19.95!
The VoIP box was connected to the portable phones and staff were encouraged to use the VoIP phones when making calls to our clients. At first they were a bit resistant to this due to having to think before picking up the phone on their desk, but after me throwing the phones at them when I noticed them making calls, they started to catch on. Most of them couldn’t tell the difference between the VoIP call and a normal ISDN call. Our clients also couldn’t tell the difference.
In the first month the long distance component of our ISDN bill went down to under $10.00! This was great, I had managed to save the company a significant amount of money by simply purchasing a VoIP ATA. I showed my boss the figures on paper and mentioned that we should use the money we save on the phone calls to upgrade our phone system to fully support this technology.
In amongst the VoIP trial we moved offices. During the move our existing phone system decided that it didn’t do phones anymore and died 
, and if your thinking it, no I didn’t ‘accidentally’ break it!
This gave us the opportunity to update our phone system sooner than expected! We were able to obtain an LG Aria 130 to replace our LG Aria 16. This system had all the bells and whistles. 
- 8 x ISDN
- 4 x PSTN
- 24 x Digital extensions
Even better part was that we did not have to replace all the handsets! We connected our ISDN lines to the ISDN obviously and connected our VoIP ATA to the PSTN lines. We then programmed what is called “Low Cost Routing”. This analyses the phone number that is being dialled and routes it out the interface that cost the company the least money. Perfect! We set up our phone system to route all outgoing calls to the VoIP lines and direct mobile, free call and local call numbers over ISDN as they always have done. The next phone bill was even better! Only call costs on the bill were 3 1300 numbers and $50 of mobile calls. Our long distance calls are now only costing the company $20 per month.
Obviously VoIP was easy to introduce in this scenario due to the company I work for being small, but I think this is something simple that any one can to do try to reduce the amount of money spent on phone calls, specially if the phone system has PSTN lines or is just standard phones. Then it was onto my next task…. Eliminating the expensive Telstra mobile phones… 
Tags: ISDN, LG Aria, Linksys, Linksys PAP2, MyNetFone, Phones, PSTN, Telstra FAIL, VoIP, VoIP Savings, VoIP Setup
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