Corporate VoIP and Hosted PBX

Hosted VoIP is priced per extension per month, with call costs billed separately or bundled into a minute allocation. Handsets are a once-off cost or rented. The saving against traditional lines comes mainly from call rates and from removing line rental rather than from the platform itself.

The variables that move the figure are extension count, whether handsets are purchased or rented, call volume and destination mix, whether call recording is required and whether failover connectivity has to be added. Compare quotations on the total including call spend at your actual volumes, because a low per-extension price with high call rates is common and it is not a saving.

Usually yes. Voice needs very little bandwidth, roughly 87 kbps per concurrent call on G.711. What it needs is consistency. Latency, jitter and packet loss matter far more than raw speed.

A well-provisioned fibre line handles voice comfortably. The failures we see are almost always internal: no quality of service configuration, voice sharing a VLAN with bulk data, or a wireless network not built for roaming voice. Assessing the network before deployment takes a day and it prevents the most common cause of a disappointing rollout.

Hosted PBX means the whole phone system runs in the provider’s data centre and you connect handsets to it. SIP trunking means you keep a PBX on your premises and the carrier delivers lines to it over the internet instead of over copper.

Hosted suits organisations that would rather not own a phone system. SIP trunking suits organisations with an existing PBX that still has life in it, or with requirements that need a local system. Both remove physical lines and both reduce call costs. The difference is who owns and maintains the platform.

Yes. Geographic and non-geographic numbers port between licensed operators in South Africa. Allow two to four weeks and expect the timeline to be driven by the donor operator.

Port them rather than changing them. Published numbers appear on signage, vehicles, stationery, directories, your Google Business Profile and every document issued over the life of the business. The cost of changing a number is mostly invisible until afterwards. The most common cause of a rejected port is a mismatch between the account details held by the donor and those on the request, which is worth verifying before submission.

Yes, through Direct Routing, Operator Connect or Microsoft calling plans. Where Teams is already your collaboration platform it removes a separate system to maintain and it puts calling into the application people already have open.

The trade is feature depth. Teams handles standard business calling well and it is less capable than a mature PBX for complex call flows, and contact centre requirements generally need an add-on platform. For most corporate environments that is not a constraint. For a service desk or a sales floor it might be, and it is worth testing against your actual call handling before committing.

Without failover, hosted VoIP stops. With it, calls continue over a secondary link. The design has two parts and the second is often missing.

The first part is connectivity failover, an LTE or secondary fibre link with automatic switchover. The second is a carrier-side divert rule that sends inbound calls to mobile numbers or voicemail when the trunk is unregistered. That rule is quick to configure and it means an outage is invisible to the person calling you. We configure both as standard.

Not necessarily. Any SIP-compatible handset can usually be reprovisioned to a new platform. Handsets from a proprietary system generally cannot, and traditional analogue and digital handsets cannot.

Analogue devices that have to stay, such as lift phones, gate intercoms, fax lines and alarm dialers, connect through an analogue telephone adapter. Those devices are the ones most often forgotten in a migration and then discovered when someone is stuck in a lift, so we inventory them explicitly at survey stage.

On a properly configured network, better. Wideband codecs carry more of the voice frequency range than a traditional line does, so calls between compatible endpoints sound noticeably clearer.

The qualifier is real. Quality is determined by the network, and a deployment without quality of service configuration will sound worse than what it replaced under load. This is the single biggest determinant of whether an organisation is happy with VoIP two years later, and it is entirely within your control.

Four to eight weeks for a typical corporate site, with number porting the longest single item. Network preparation and platform configuration run in parallel with the port.

The sequence that works is: assess, prepare the network, build and test the platform, submit the port, run in parallel with the old system live, then cut over. Parallel running matters. Cutting over at the same moment the numbers port removes your ability to fall back, and the fallback is what makes the cutover low risk.

Yes. Click-to-dial from a contact record, screen pop on inbound calls matching caller ID, and call logging against the record are standard on most platforms, either natively or through an API.

Depth varies. Native integrations for common CRM platforms generally work out of the box. Anything custom needs development against the platform API and should be scoped separately rather than assumed. Ask for a demonstration against your specific CRM rather than a compatibility list.

No. Electronic communications services in South Africa require an ICASA licence and the licensed service is provided by the carrier. We design, deploy and manage the platform and the network underneath it, and we work with your existing carrier or help you select one.

That separation is worth understanding when comparing providers. Some integrators resell carrier services and some carriers offer integration. Both models work. What matters is knowing who is accountable for the line when a call fails, and having that written down before it happens.

When your connectivity is genuinely unreliable and cannot be made redundant, when your site has a small number of extensions and an existing system that works, or where a specific regulatory requirement mandates a physical line.

For a five-person office with a working phone system and no growth plans, migrating is effort for a marginal saving. The case gets strong at multiple sites, at meaningful call volumes, where staff move between locations, or where the existing system needs replacing anyway. If you are in the first group, we will say so.