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 is IP-Centrex.ca?

IP-Centrex.ca is the name for netVOICE communications' own IP Centrex service offering.

What features are available with netVOICE IP-Centrex.ca?

• voice mail
• autoattendant
• call queuing ("All our operators are busy, if you wait .....")
• conference calls
• transfer
• call parking
• DID
• call forwarding
• speed dial
• night service
• find me/follow me
• message waiting indication
• email delivery of voice mail
• call pickup

Some of these features are included in the base service offering and others are priced separately.

What does IP-Centrex.ca cost?

Less than you think! The exact pricing depends on the features required, the number of extensions, and the contract duration but range from $30 to $45 per month per extension. For low-volume customers we also have an single-line service available for $9.95/month plus $0.01/minute for local calls. Compare this with the cost of a single business line from Telus (without any Centrex or PBX features and without overline/rotary) of $41.30. See our detailed list of Services and Tariffs or contact us for pricing for your requirements.

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 IBM rack-mounted servers located at Group Telecom's facility.

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.