Improving the Lines of Communication with Voice Over IP (VOIP)

There aren’t many arenas on which you can better reveal your currency—or utter lack thereof—than with your phone system. If you’re a business person who fancies him- or herself occupying one of the sharper stops along the old technology scale, but the phone you pick up to announce same dates back to the Ark, you might want to reconsider the assessment.

The sweeping appearance of voice and data networks on the evolving scene put analog, digital and key phone office systems out to pasture. If you’re still punching up one of these babies, though, I wouldn’t despair. We at 360 can yank your legacies into the latest century with telephone technology that’ll lay you flat.

Our world-class converged communications solutions capitalize on the latest Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and set you up with a state-of-the-art phone system that’s as robust and flexible as it is reliable and cost effective. What’s more, because so much of the cool stuff is software based, thus sidestepping the proprietary hardware-rooted phone systems of old, it’s a breeze to manage yourself.

This kind of thing is particularly worth hearing if you’re at the helm of a “virtual office” whose requirements for a full range of telephony and networking functionality are every bit as acute as those of the guy in the more conventional office setting.

There are many hallmarks to a good phone system. Maybe it allows a company to communicate across multiple offices as if employees were in the same building, whether that means patching a client through to a remote staffer or allowing employees in any location to pick up an incoming call.

Maybe it accommodates the latest in videophone technology and is reliable enough to finally count as a legitimate alternative to travel.

Or maybe it’s just an ultracool setup that lets users dip into the latest finds—including instant messaging, web-based collaboration, and all manner of video and mobility solutions—from the telecommunications pool.

The waves began in the 1870s, when a slew of inventors made a dash for the patent office to indemnify designs for telegraph-busting technology that transmitted speech electrically. Alexander Graham Bell clocked in first and the rest, as they say, is history.

The earliest phone made good on the hypothesis that by converting sound waves into electrical signals and employing a transmitter with a membrane capable of broadcasting them and a receiver capable of reproducing them, one could reinvent forever what it means to communicate remotely.

Today the humble telephone is among the most common household appliances. By the end of 2006, there were nearly four billion mobile and fixed-line subscribers worldwide. Four billion! Talk about a killer app.
Eventually, the industry gravitated into digital telephony, improving its quality and capacity along the way and today, well, today, all bets are off. Telephone conversations that started as analog signals over wires are digital signals that travel by micro- and lightwaves over land, optical fibre and air. The traditional analog telephone is converging with computer data and entertainment networks. Cats are mating with dogs. And nothing nothing nothing will ever be the same.

Over here at 360, the best thing is that we get to watch all this change from the front lines. More than that, we get to effect it.