How to choose the right phone for your VoIP needs SIP phones vs IP phones
Great, you’ve made the switch to a legacy-free VoIP system. Now you need to make sure you choose the right phone to match your workforce’s requirements
It’s hard to get accurate advice on which IP phone to buy. There are plenty of advice articles on the internet, but they’re often vague and it’s not always clear whether they’re simply there to make you buy the most expensive phone. To dig into the details, we spoke to Nick Borg, product manager for 3CX and a veteran of deploying many VoIP systems to businesses. As will become clear, he’s just as keen for you to buy the right phone for your VoIP system as you will be.
First things first: what, we asked Nicolas, was the difference between SIP and IP phones. Or was that a stupid question? “It’s not a stupid question! Yes, all SIP phones are IP phones, but you need to understand that there are many different VoIP protocols out there. They’re like languages. So, when you’re buying a SIP phone, you’re buying a phone that can talk in SIP language – and because 3CX has chosen SIP, you need to make sure that your chosen IP phone speaks SIP.”
Do you need an IP phone at all?
Surely, we suggested, people can get away with softphones? Isn’t that why 3CX puts so much effort into the apps for Android and iOS phones? “Some people want a phone. They want to pick it up to answer it, they want to dial the numbers,” said Borg. “I would reverse the question and look at it from the point of view of an administrator or the users themselves.”
Borg cited the example of a 24/7 call centre where people will be sharing desks: you need to not only have a hardware phone, but make sure it supports hotdesking. Contrast that to a delivery service: “So, this guy is always in a truck or van. I would make sure I give him an app on a phone. It depends on the nature of your work and what you want from your apparatus.”
Match each user’s needs to the phone
This raises a wider point – the need to match the phone to the specific user’s requirements. If you start hunting for an IP phone, you’ll be bombarded with features: colour screens; multi-way voice conferencing; dual Gigabit ports; Power-over-Ethernet (PoE); support for a dozen lines and multiple SIP accounts; HD audio; video. How do you choose what’s right for your business?
“First of all, try not to buy too many different types of phones. Buy phones from the same manufacturer, if you can,” said Borg. “A phone is a living entity on my network. It can be compromised. You can have man-in-the-middle attacks, you can have eavesdropping. You need to keep this phone up to date. So maintaining many different types of phones is asking for trouble.”
That doesn’t mean buying one phone and giving it to every single person in the business. But it does mean that all people doing a similar type of job should have the same phone. For example, executives will benefit from a colour LCD that shows them who’s calling, but if you’re outfitting a sales floor then you may not need an LCD at all. Take the time to understand the benefit of each feature and match it to the user case.
“Take the example of a busy employee, focusing on his work – it would be good to alert him with an audio cue that says whether it’s a sales call or a technical call. If, for example, it says ‘tweet tweet tweet’, that’s his sales cue. He knows what kind of call is coming in and can prepare for it. That’s how you need to think about features. How can you make your staff more productive, more efficient?”
So what about specific examples: an executive may want a flashier phone than others in the office, but is there really any argument for this other than status? “The executive is on top of the chain,” said Borg. “You don’t want to waste his or her time with speculative calls, so you filter them. The CEO might assign a pool or people to be his first barrier, and when a call does come through he or she will need to know exactly who’s on the line.”
Borg points out that executives will also need the highest-quality audio and support for multi-way audio conferencing, and while they may not yet make video calls this is now an ever-present feature on executive-level phones. “Also, executive phones are more compact and have fewer buttons, as opposed to receptionist’s phones, which would have more buttons, more lights blinking, more statuses, more notifications.” Talking of which...
Choosing a receptionist’s phone
“Normally, a receptionist’s phone needs to be pretty pumped up,” enthused Borg. “There are some receptionists who have enormous amounts of calls to make.” As such, they need a way to handle all those calls – and to make sure they don’t transfer a call to someone who’s already busy. A key weapon to handle this is a sidecar.
“If you have a company with 500 people in it, how can the receptionist see if someone’s already on a call? A busy lamp field (BLF) helps, but a normal phone only has maybe ten keys – or, if it’s digital, you can swap between pages and get about 40. But beyond that you need more. Attach a sidecar, even two sidecars, four sidecars, and these will extend your lamps from tens to hundreds.” That doesn’t mean you need to cram in features – five-way audio conferencing might be overkill.
Hotdesking hot tips
One of the biggest advantages of some IP phones is that users can log into them in the same way they do their computer. That’s perfect for an office based on hotdesking or that operates 24/7 in shifts. “Let’s say you come in at 8am,” said Borg. “The phone on your desk is in ‘neutral’ mode, but once you enter your username and password, it becomes your phone. All your caller IDs. All your logging. Your shortcuts. At home time, log out of the phone and everything is cleared. The next person in has a fresh phone.” This isn’t some cleverness on the part of the phone, Borg explains. “It’s because the IT team has set up your profile, just like they do on your workstation. You can make incredible cost savings this way.”