Phones that follow your people, not your building
Hosted PBX, SIP trunking and mobile calling for teams of five to five hundred. Because ICS operates the switch rather than reselling one, changes get made rather than escalated.
The phone system is usually the last thing anybody thinks about
It gets replaced when the old one dies, chosen in a hurry, and then nobody touches it for eight years. Meanwhile the business changed shape: people work from home two days a week, the mobile became the real number, and the receptionist role turned into three people sharing it.
What most businesses actually need is not more features. It is for calls to reach a human quickly, wherever that human happens to be sitting.
This is for you if
- You have between five and five hundred people who take calls
- Staff work across more than one location, or from home some of the week
- You want to keep your existing numbers
- You would rather call one company about both the phones and the network
What is on the platform
Hosted PBX and IP Centrex
The full phone system delivered from the ICS switch rather than a box in your comms cupboard. Extensions, call routing, voicemail, hunt groups and auto attendant, administered from a web portal.
SIP trunking
If you have a PBX that still has life in it, SIP trunks connect it to the outside world over your internet connection, usually at a lower line cost than the copper it replaces.
Direct inward dial numbers
DID numbers in the city of your choice, provisioned through a self-service portal. Useful when you want a presence in a market before you have an office in it.
Call recording and reporting
Recording where you need it for training or compliance, plus call detail reporting so you can see what is actually happening on the lines.
Codec and protocol support 6 rows
| SIP compliance | Full SIP compliance, with NAT traversal through media proxy |
|---|---|
| Audio codecs | G.711, G.729, OPUS |
| DTMF | Outband via RFC 2833, inband, and SIP INFO |
| Call quality handling | Packet loss concealment, echo cancellation, adaptive jitter buffer |
| Video codecs | H.263, H.264 |
| Messaging | Instant messaging over XMPP, with presence |
Mobile VoIP, for the half of your team who are not at a desk
A mobile SIP client on Android and iOS turns a staff phone into an extension. Calls made and received on it use the business number, and the call history stays with the business rather than on a personal handset.
- Identity and authentication. Mobile number as identity, OTP authentication, profile image, change number and delete account.
- Voice and SMS. Dialpad with country code prefixes, call duration and billing display, dialled, received and missed call history, mute and speakerphone.
- Instant messaging. Send and receive over XMPP, chat history with participant, date and time, multiple concurrent conversations, group chat and message broadcasting.
- Sharing. File and location sharing, push to talk, emoticons, and sent, received and seen status on messages.
- Video calling. One to one video, front and back camera switching, own video in inset, and the ability to drop video and continue on audio.
- Address book integration. Works with the native phone address book rather than asking staff to maintain a second one.
- Controls. Block contact, clear chat, chat backup, language change, and notification settings per message and call.
- SMS over HTTP. Send SMS to mobile numbers through an HTTP interface, for systems that need to notify people automatically.
Hosted receptionist, if you do not have one
A small business gets a professional auto attendant on inbound calls, with callers routed by group: one for sales, two for support, and so on. Routing can also be based on where the call originates.
Calls then terminate on the mobile numbers your staff already carry, which removes the need for broadband and SIP handsets at every desk.
The practical benefit is coverage. Callers reach a professional greeting outside office hours instead of a dead line, and calls get picked up when the person is out on a job.
Questions
Can we keep our existing numbers?
Yes. Number portability is standard, and it is handled as part of the changeover rather than left to you to arrange.
What happens if our internet goes down?
Calls fail over to mobile numbers you nominate, so the business stays reachable. This is worth configuring properly at setup, and it is one of the things most often left undone by other providers.
Do you supply the handsets?
Yes, and we install and configure them. See Managed IT for hardware procurement more generally.
Is this the same platform your carrier customers use?
It is. The Class 5 side of the same switch described under Carrier Services. A ten-person business gets carrier-grade infrastructure because that is simply what ICS runs.
Tell us what your phones do now
Twenty minutes. We will tell you whether changing is worth the disruption, honestly.