If someone has told you your phone system needs to move to VoIP and you nodded along without knowing what they meant, you are in good company. Here is the plain version.
What VoIP actually is
VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. Instead of your call travelling down a dedicated copper phone line, it travels over your internet connection as data – the same way an email or a video call does. Your number stays the same. Customers ringing you notice nothing at all.
The handset on your desk can look identical to the one you have now. The difference is what it plugs into: a network cable rather than a phone socket.
Why this is happening now
The old copper network is being retired across Australia. As NBN rolls through, traditional phone lines get disconnected and services move onto the internet connection. For most businesses this is not a choice to weigh up so much as a change to plan for properly rather than be caught out by.
The cost comparison
Traditional lines charge you per line. If you need four people able to talk at once, you rent four lines, whether they are in use or not. Add call costs on top, and extra charges for anything clever like call diversion.
VoIP charges per user, and the line rental disappears because you are using internet you already pay for. Most business VoIP plans in Australia include unlimited calls to local, national and Australian mobile numbers. Typical savings for a small office sit around 30–50% on the monthly bill, and more if you have been paying for lines nobody uses.
The bigger saving is usually on changes. Adding a phone for a new staff member used to mean a technician visit and a new line. On VoIP it is a configuration change and a handset in the post.
What you get that you did not have before
- Mobile apps. Your business number on your mobile, so calls made from your phone show the office number and personal calls stay separate.
- Voicemail to email. Messages arrive in your inbox as an audio file, often with a text transcript.
- Call forwarding and hunt groups. Ring the front desk for fifteen seconds, then the mobiles, then voicemail. Set it yourself.
- Auto attendant. "Press 1 for sales" – worth having once more than a couple of people answer.
- Time-of-day routing. After-hours calls go somewhere sensible automatically.
- Call reporting. How many calls came in, how many were missed, and when. Most businesses are surprised by the missed number.
- Messages on hold. Straightforward to record and update.
The reliability question, answered honestly
The fair concern is this: if the internet goes down, do the phones go down? On a badly set up system, yes. On a properly set up one, no – because failover is built in.
Two things handle it. First, call forwarding at the network level: if the system cannot reach your handsets, calls divert to nominated mobiles automatically, and callers never know. Second, a 4G/5G backup connection that takes over when the fixed line drops out. Between them, an outage becomes an inconvenience rather than a day of silence.
The other half of reliability is call quality, which comes down to how the internet connection is configured. Voice traffic needs to be prioritised over everything else on the network – that is a setting, and it is the difference between crystal-clear calls and choppy ones. Any installer worth using does this as standard.
What you need in place
- A stable internet connection with enough upload capacity – roughly 100 kbps per simultaneous call, which is very little, but it must be consistent.
- A business-grade router that can prioritise voice.
- Network cabling to each desk, or a Wi-Fi handset where cabling is not practical.
- A plan for power outages – handsets need power, mobiles do not.
Making the switch
Bold Media Group moves Australian businesses from old phone lines to cloud phone systems, keeping existing numbers and setting up the failover so calls never go missing during or after the change. We handle the internet side too, which is usually where the quality issues start.
If your lines are due to be cut over, or your current bill looks heavier than it should be, talk to us and we will map out what changes and what stays the same.