Common questions and answers about digital business voice.
Ravon Business Digital Voice products are available in the US and Canada. Please contact us to verify availability in your area.
Common reasons why businesses switch to a business digital phone service include:
- When your business outgrows your current telephone system.
- When you want to save on long distance charges.
- When your existing telephone system lease is up for renewal.
- When you are tired of slow response times and high service charges for changes to your existing service.
In short, you can communicate your own terms.
Low cost queues allow you to establish call patterns that follow workflow routines.
- Extend customer service hours by routing calls to different time zones.
- Establish priority treatment for your top tier customers.
- Route calls to skilled employees.
Provide workers at home with the full power of your office communications network.
- Save on real estate costs by allowing customer service workers to connect from home.
- Hire remote employees in regions with attractive labor rates.
Link offices across the country, or across the world on the same IP PBX
- Simplified dialing and presence detection between locations.
Our VoIP products help control costs in many areas:
- Reduced costs for moves, adds, and changes:
Due to the inherent mobility of IP phones, users can easily move phones around their registered location without reprogramming or rewiring. Staff members can administer adds and changes online, including real-time dialing plan changes. - Calling options available to meet your needs. Ravon VoIP offers a range of choices such as unlimited pricing, metered pricing and tiered pricing.
- Use your existing Key or PBX equipment: Ravon's VoIP products offer a range of choices - they can interface with an existing PBX or Key System or provide hosted and managed solutions, as well as ones that deliver an end-to-end solution.
Choose the product that matches your needs. - Reduced costs for mobile employees: Remote users can access the network as if they were on-net and avoid incurring call charges on a residential or hotel phone bill.
VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol or IP) is a technology that enables voice communications over the Internet through the compression of voice into data packets that can be efficiently transmitted over data networks and then converted back into voice at the other end. Data networks, such as the Internet or local area networks (LANs), have always utilized packet-switched technology to transmit information between two communicating terminals (for example, a PC downloading a page from a web server, or one computer sending an e-mail message to another computer). The most common protocol used for communicating on these packet-switched networks is Internet protocol, or IP.
VoIP allows for the transmission of voice along with other data over these same packet-switched networks and provides an alternative to traditional telephone networks, which use a fixed electrical path to carry voice signals through a series of switches to a destination.
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a call control protocol that establishes and terminates "media sessions." Examples of media sessions include phone calls, e-mail, streamed video, and instant messaging. SIP standardizes these communications by adding a protocol that is independent of the underlying network and infrastructure. It is not dependent on ports, pipes, hardware or software, but allows all of these components to talk with each other and media to be controlled independently from the network.
SIP is the packet voice protocol of choice by major IP voice initiatives such as the G3 wireless consortium and Microsoft. A highly flexible protocol, SIP specifies the basic and supplementary services to create, modify, and delete these multimedia sessions or calls. By utilizing SIP, we enable customers to use applications regardless of the client's network or access type.
SIP's foundation in HTTP allows it to integrate with Web, e-mail, and other data applications using a URL format, providing a highly flexible protocol. SIP's ease of use and flexibility pave the way for new services and capabilities in the future.
IP Trunking allows businesses with IP PBXs to extend the benefits of Voice over IP (VoIP) convergence from their LAN to the WAN and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
It eliminates the need for expensive TDM gateways and trunks, helps to increase network efficiencies and cost-savings by converging voice and data traffic on your WAN, and retains all the features and services of your existing TDM connections.
In addition to these benefits, IP Trunking is specifically designed to allow you to connect multiple locations over the same VoIP trunk while maintaining local telephone numbers, calling plans and 911 services.
An IP (Internet Protocol) PBX (Private branch exchange) is a business telephone system designed to deliver voice over a data network and interoperate with the normal Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
No, depending on the solution selected, you can continue to use your PBX, Key System or Analog phones.
IP phones enable you to make IP calls straight from your desktop, allowing your business to remove your PBX or to enable a new site with no investment in a PBX or other traditional voice equipment. These phones also have several other benefits: Moves, adds, and changes support requirements are greatly reduced due to the plug-and play-nature of these devices. They connect to a LAN port and can be configured via the VoIP Web site. A significant benefit is the ability for any user to authenticate on a particular phone, and receive their chosen phone services, such as voicemail, call screening, or forwarding.
Ravon understands that our customers have substantial investments in circuit-switched hardware and phone systems, so we have created an environment where you can decide what makes sense for your organization. Keep your existing PBX, use your existing phones, or deploy IP phones to the desktop — or do a combination of the options above. Ravon's VoIP products provide unlimited expansion possibilities, growing as your organization grows.
It typically does not. Data packets may experience some delay under Quality of Service (QoS) voice packet prioritization, but it should not affect delivery in a noticeable way.
The quality is comparable to regular Public Switch Telephone Network (PSTN) service. We manage QoS using equipment on the customer premise, as well as in our network.
The benefits of this solution include:
- High quality voice calls
- Voice traffic is prioritized over data for inbound and outbound traffic
- Eliminates the need to overprovision bandwidth
- Enhances router performance by offloading QoS function
Yes, toll-free traffic can originate and terminate. Advanced toll-free features, such as Enhanced Call Routing, are currently in development.
Authentication and Validation are the primary security features used by the phones. Authentication validates the usernames and passwords to ensure only trusted users are on the network. For IP Phones, authentication is performed by SIP digest user authentication. For a PBX with a router/gateway, authentication is performed via IP Sec.
Administrators can manage enterprise settings using our Ravon Web Portal to make provisioning changes and administer features and calling treatments. Administrators can also access call reporting details via the Web interface.
Yes, these numbers will remain the same.
Yes, directory assistance is fully supported.
Yes, 911 service is supported and PS/ALI are supported.
Dial plans in place today for existing Ravon Business voice customers can be supported. Additionally, your PBX dial plans can also be supported. Dialing plans may be up to 32 digits in length.
A single team, Ravon Business VoIP Sales Support, supports all VoIP orders. They bring the following expertise to your VoIP experience:
- Track milestones, communicate to team, and drive the order(s) to completion.
- Work with the Account team to assure the technical solution best fits the business case.
- Support all your issues following installation.
- Ravon Business VoIP Sales Support is available prior to and following your installation. They will work with you to maintain the features and setup that your business requires.
Yes, Support can assist with feature changes and management. Users may also administer their own services through the Ravon web-based administrator which is quick and easy to use.
