Hosted IP services provider Hostcomm has encountered a significant increase in demand for hosted telephony and VoIP services, the company revealed today. In the past few months, the uptake of hosted telephony and SIP trunking has grown in pace, with more businesses aware of the potential benefits of a hosted solution, including reduced costs and greater flexibility.
Many of Hostcomm’s new clients arrived after a bad experience at alternative VoIP service providers.
“The adoption of hosted telephony has been growing steadily for several years,” says Chris Key, Director at Hostcomm. “We continue to retain our existing clients and attract new ones who want to eliminate CAPEX, reduce management and maintenance costs, and get a solution that can scale up and down with their business. But one change we have seen more recently is how informed clients are about hosted telephony, and the service standards they should expect.”
According to research and consulting firm Infonetics, 2013 saw adoption of VoIP services grow by 8%. Meanwhile, the adoption of SIP trunks rocketed by an astonishing 50%. Based on this data, hosted telephony is more popular than ever – a trend that looks set to continue.
However, VoIP has a reputation for impaired service quality. While new technology has largely eliminated major issues, achieving the best possible service and call quality requires a network infrastructure built for hosted telephony. Many of Hostcomm’s clients came to the company after a bad experience at another VoIP service provider, looking for an experienced team with a proven track record in maintaining quality.
“It’s everything from implementing redundancy to avoid downtime to making sure that every client has all the bandwidth they require,” adds Key. “The difficulty is that, as the technology behind hosted telephony has changed so dramatically in the past few years, it’s vital to keep up. At Hostcomm, our infrastructure is designed and configured for telephony – but if the growth of VoIP is to continue, the entire industry needs to make service quality a priority.”
When looking for an appropriate VoIP service provider, look for an OFCOM-compliant network, bringing together multiple carriers. Important features include full redundancy to provide automatic failover in the event of carrier outage and intelligent traffic shaping that ensures the average call duration (ACD) is always at a level carriers will accept.
Together, these features play an essential role in providing clients from small businesses to large-scale contact centres with crystal-clear calling that is always available.
