As traditional phone service costs have gone up dramatically, without adding new features, any solution offered at lower rates is bound to create demand. Today, many small and medium businesses (SMB) are choosing VoIP to replace their current telephone system. Over the past ten years, the market for VoIP has been driven by a number of factors, chiefly the promise of inexpensive voice communication. As traditional phone service costs have gone up dramatically, without adding new features, any solution offered at lower rates is bound to create demand.

Today, many small and medium businesses (SMB) are choosing VoIP to replace their current telephone system. VoIP is a term used to describe the transmission of telephone calls using a data network, rather than over traditional phone lines. It is a simple concept, and one that is having a significant impact on the world of business communications. The SMB market for VoIP is growing astronomically across the world as businesses realize that VoIP is now a mature enough technology to deliver high quality service, feature improvements and cost savings.

Low-Cost Broadband Changes the Telephony Game

As VoIP is less expensive to deploy, service providers can pass the savings on to its customers. Since no physical equipment other than a phone and a broadband phone adapter are needed onsite, features can be upgraded without additional charges in a seamless process. Because VoIP has been less affected by regulations and taxes than traditional telephone service, this has also helped keep prices at a minimum.

The explosive adoption of broadband Internet access is aiding VoIP market growth, because VoIP uses these high-speed connections as its transport rather than requiring separate, expensive telephone lines. Since so many potential VoIP customers already have broadband connections and want few features like voicemail to email notification, they see the logical choice is to leave behind traditional phone service for less expensive VoIP phone service. Also, now that portability of phone numbers is available, switching to a business VoIP phone system can be completely transparent to employees and customers.

VoIP Is the Future

As a result of VoIP's potential cost savings and added features, consumers, small business, enterprises, traditional telecommunication service providers (telcos), and cable television providers are viewing it as the future of telecommunication. VoIP has experienced significant growth in recent years due several factors:

- Demand for lower cost phone service;
- Carriers drive to reduce costs while providing more features;
- Customers increased feature set without capital investments;
- More dispersed workplace driven by teleworkers and best of breed global hiring practices;
- Improved quality and reliability of broadband networks enabling
- VoIP calls over standard broadband lines, as well as inexpensive increased bandwidth capacity;
- New product innovations that allow VoIP providers to offer services not currently offered by traditional telephone products.

The bottom line for today''s small business is that VoIP can give a business of any size the same kinds of telephony features that multinational enterprises typically enjoy at a lower cost.

By Michael Brito