netVOICE IP Centrex Frequently Asked Questions

What is IP Centrex?

To answer this question we need to answer first the questions:

• What is IP?
• What is IP telephony?
• What is Centrex?

What is IP?

IP stands for Internet Protocol, the technology that underlies the Internet. And as we all know, the Internet is the most significant revolution in communications technology since the invention of the telephone.

What is IP telephony?

IP telephony, also known as Voice over IP (VoIP), is the use of Internet protocols to carry telephone calls. Previously all telephone calls travelled over wires and circuits dedicated to voice communications. With VoIP, telephone calls are converted into data and then the data travels over circuits along with other data such as email, web traffic, and file transfers.

Why?

There are many advantages to using IP telephony over traditional approaches to voice communications:

1. The cost of sending data over the Internet is insensitive to distance. An email across the Atlantic costs the same as an email across the office. By converting voice calls into data, VoIP can exploit this distance-insensitive pricing model enjoyed by email.
2. The cost of installing two separate sets of wires in the office, one for voice (the telephone circuits) and one for data (the LAN) becomes redundant. Organisations can reduce costs and improve efficiencies by only needing one communications infrastructure.
3. Until recently the cost of the computing power to switch telephone calls was sufficiently high that it made sense to put all the intelligence into a central switch (the central office or PBX) and make telephones particularly dumb. Now, however, microprocessors are cheap and phones can be very intelligent. But that intelligence needs an equally flexible infrastructure. Telephone wires cannot provide that.

What is Centrex?

Before the advent of VoIP there were, broadly speaking, two ways to provide office workers with telephone service:

• an organisation can install a PBX which switches calls within the office, connects the office phones with the larger telephone network, and delivers services such as voice mail and automated attendant.
• an organisation can contract with the telephone company to provide the same services using the switch installed at the telephone company's premises. This service (telephone company hosted switch) is called Centrex.

Historically the advantage of having one's own PBX is the ability access features and services unavailable from Centrex and/or to reduce costs as compared to the telco's prices for Centrex.

What is IP Centrex?

IP Centrex is a service which provides full-featured telephone service to office workers over the Internet from a switch located at the service provider's facility.

The primary difference between traditional Centrex and IP Centrex is that the old-fashioned service required every phone in the office to be connected by separate circuits to the telephone company's central office (CO). This reliance on the wires from the CO limited the number of companies that could offer the service and increased the costs.

IP Centrex is delivered over the Internet which eliminates the choke hold the telcos have on traditional Centrex. The result is a more competitively priced offering with more features.

Because IP Centrex is not tied to traditional telephone circuits, it is easy to provide service to geographically distributed operations. A company with branch offices can all be part of the same service.

What are the advantages of Centrex over a PBX?

Centrex is offered by a service provider who is responsible for purchasing, installing, maintaining, and operating the necessary equipment to provide.

In contrast having a PBX means in essence being your own telephone company. You become responsible for everything although, of course, you can subcontract any or all of these responsibilities.

Which is less expensive depends on many factors and requires a careful analysis to determine the approach best for each situation.

The recent availability of IP Centrex provides an exciting new alternative to two existing approaches to provide telephone services to organisations.

NetVOICE communications can provide both PBX and IP Centrex solutions as well as combinations of the two. Since we can provide whichever solutions fits your needs best we will not try to sell you on one approach or the other if it is not best for.

What are the advantages of IP Centrex over Centrex?

• IP Centrex does not require the considerable investment in circuits to connect the office phones to the central office and therefore can be offered by many more companies (i.e. increased competition) and at a lower cost (because it does not require the same infrastructure)
• IP Centrex is free of the geographical contraints of traditional telephone services making it easy to integrate remote offices, home workers, telecommuters, and indeed travellers in hotels with the office phone system
• IP phones know their identity (unlike older analog phones) and the maintenance costs associated with office moves is eliminated.

What does IP-Centrex.ca cost?

Less than you think! The exact pricing depends on the exact services you require and the contract duration but range from $39.95 per extension for small quantities, dropping as low as $9.95 per extension in quantity. Compare this with the cost of a single business line from Telus (without any Centrex or PBX features and without overline/rotary) of $45.

Please complete our enquiry form and we will prepare a custom quotation for your consideration.

Do you offer free unlimited North American long distance?

We do not offer free North American Long Distance (nor, in fact, does anyone). Those that claim "Unlimited" long distance usually have buried somewhere in their fine-print something similar to the following (this has been taken from an actual VoIP supplier contract, only the company name has been changed):

"Unlimited Definition & Guidelines: Unlimited Two-Way SIP Trunk Service is a business service provided for use with a Phone System and is designed for small to medium sized business use. Unlimited Two-Way SIP Trunk Service may be used only for lawful, proper and appropriate purposes and may not be used in any way that is illegal, improper or inappropriate. Unlimited Two-Way SIP Trunk Service inappropriate and prohibited use restrictions include, but are not limited to: resale or transfer; auto-dialing; continuous or extensive call forwarding; continuous connectivity; fax broadcast/blasting; telemarketing; predictive dialing; or any other use or activity that is inconsistent with normal small to medium sized business usage. ACME the right to measure for appropriate use and at its sole discretion may determine that the Service has been subject to inappropriate use. In the event inappropriate use is determined, ACME request the customer change or modify the Service use and/or Service plan. Additionally, ACME the right to immediately terminate Service and charge a minimum inappropriate use fee of $500 and/or charge $0.05 per minute for all calls made during such periods of prohibited use (plus applicable international charges), whichever is higher, as well as all applicable Termination fees described in Section 23 under the terms of this Agreement."

Since all VoIP suppliers have to pay something to their upstream carriers for terminating long distance calls, the choices are either to average out the costs and therefore overcharge the light LD users so that they can provide "free" LD for the heavier users (and for the very heavy users, include a clause that allows them to cancel service or charge for LD like the one shown above); or to charge a fair price to each user. Another thing to be concerned about when considering a company that provides "Free" long distance is that they almost certainly are using a discount carrier to save on their per-minute costs. The problem (and we have tried using a number of discount carriers) is that the call quality is not acceptable for most business users. We use premium routes only with an obvious and immediately apparent improvement in quality, but these cost us almost twice as much as the cheap routes. One gets what one pays for.

So we think the fairest method to handle LD is to charge a modest fee which enables us to use high-quality routes. Also, for those cities to which we have a lot of traffic, we have dedicated trunks so we can offer "free" calling into: Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City. For everywhere else, we charge $0.03/minute.

Are you reselling someone else's IP Centrex service or is this your own service?

IP-Centrex.ca is NetVoice's own service. It is based on Asterisk (the Open Source IP PBX solution we sell and support) running on a redundant network of rack-mounted servers located at Tier 1 data centres in Canada.

Running our own servers provides two major advantages over other organisations that are reselling a service they do not operate:

1. Since our own technicians install, configure, and manage the switches we use to deliver the service we are in a far better position to handle unusual requests or custom solutions. We are not a one-size-fits-all Voice Service Provider.
2. Since we use the same IP PBX software to run IP-Centrex.ca as we sell and support for customers, the experience we have gained in one area has benefitted the other. We are better able to deliver IP PBX systems because we operate IP-Centrex.ca. We are better able to run IP-Centrex.ca because we are in the field daily installing and maintaining custom IP PBX systems running the same software.