Unified Communications & Telephony
IP Telephony
On-premise, hosted or hybrid telephone systems over SIP, with the network-side quality of service that decides whether calls hold up when the office is busy.
The telephone system is usually the first thing an organisation notices when the network is wrong. Voice tolerates almost no packet loss and very little jitter, and unlike a file transfer it cannot recover by retrying — a lost packet is a gap the listener hears. That makes call quality a network design question far more than a handset question.
The three things that decide it are separation, marking and power. Voice on its own VLAN keeps it away from bulk traffic; DSCP marking honoured by every switch and router along the path keeps it prioritised when links get busy; and a PoE budget calculated across the whole switch keeps handsets from browning out when the last desks are populated.
Beyond quality, the choice is architectural: on-premise gives control and survives an internet outage, hosted removes the hardware and the upgrade cycle, hybrid keeps local survivability with central management. All three are legitimate and the right one depends on how many sites there are and how tolerable an outage is.
What this covers
Handsets and softphones
Desk phones, DECT for staff who move around a site, and softphones on laptops and mobiles sharing one extension and one directory.
Call routing and IVR
Time-of-day routing, hunt groups, queues and auto-attendant menus configured to how the organisation actually answers calls.
SIP trunking
Connection to the public network over SIP, with the trunk count sized from concurrent calls rather than from headcount.
Recording and reporting
Call recording where compliance or training requires it, with retention and access controlled deliberately.
Survivability
Local call handling that keeps working when the WAN does not, so an internet outage does not also mean the telephones are dead.
What we will ask you
These are the questions that decide the specification. Having the answers ready is what turns a first conversation into a real quotation.
- 01
How many concurrent calls, not how many staff?
Trunk and licence counts follow from simultaneous calls at peak. Sizing from headcount over-provisions most organisations and under-provisions contact centres.
- 02
What happens when the internet drops?
A fully hosted system with no local survivability means no telephones during an outage. For some sites that is acceptable; for others it decides the architecture.
- 03
Is the LAN ready for voice?
Voice VLAN, end-to-end QoS and PoE headroom. If these are not in place, the telephony project becomes a network project halfway through.