(a) Guide
Business phone: hosted voice vs landline
Most businesses move to hosted voice for features and end up keeping it for the flexibility.
What hosted voice changes day to day
Calls route over your internet connection rather than a copper line, which means extensions can live anywhere, call flows can change without an engineer visit, and voicemail, auto-attendants, call recording and reporting come as configuration rather than hardware. For multi-site businesses, one numbering plan can cover every location.
Your connection becomes part of the phone system
Because voice runs on the same circuit as everything else, call quality depends on capacity and prioritisation. Voice traffic should be prioritised at the router, sized for concurrent calls, and ideally protected by a failover path so a line fault does not take the phones with it.
Questions to ask before you switch
- Can every published number be ported, including fax and tracking numbers?
- What happens to calls during an internet outage — do they divert to mobiles automatically?
- Are emergency calling details registered correctly for each physical site?
- How many concurrent calls does the plan support at peak?
- Which handsets are supported, and who configures them?
- What are the contract term and exit notice?
Port early, keep the old lines running
Number porting runs on its own schedule and is the most common cause of a rough cutover. Start it as soon as service is ordered and never cancel the old carrier before the port completes — cancelling can release the number.
Commercial service only · United States