Packet8 Business Service plans are perfect for businesses with heavy phone usage. Packet8 offers only one home office/ small office VoIP plan, which is an unlimited VoIP long distance calling plan.

Packet8’s unlimited VoIP long distance calling plan is $34.95 per month which allows you unlimited free calls to anyone in the U.S. or Canada.

Packet8 has by far the least expensive calling plan available but it doesn’t have some of the more advanced features that some of the other carriers provide. Packet8 also has unlimited calling plans to both Asia and Europe as well. Please check the Packet8 website for details.

——– NOTE —————
You can save $14.95 off of the activation fee by providing them with the Packet8 coupon code or Packet8 reseller code “telebay-mbvoip”. Click here.
——————————–

nStream and MoBif formed a partnership in Malaysia early 2005, making them the first company in Malaysia to come out with a full scale, high quality VoIP service compatible for both home users and small businesses / SOHO.

nStream offices and distribution centers are currently available in these countries:

• Malaysia
• Singapore
• Indonesia
• Philiphines
• Hong Kong

The nStream plan is currently at $10 per month, also making it the most affordable VoIP plan in the region.

Ideal for the home business or small business setting, nStream Voice is compatible with most other PBX or keyphone systems, and is currently the no. 1 selling VoIP service in Malaysia.

The “NSV” is also cost-effecient because you can still maintain your phone number and no migration plans are necessary.

While VoIP is a brutally competitive field, some unique solutions manage to find themselves a niche market that they serve almost perfectly.

One such solution is nStream Voice. And the niche is inter-branch calling.

nStream Voice or NSV, developed by a beneficial partnership between nStream Gateway Sdn. Bhd. and Mobif Sdn. Bhd. became the first successfully developed and marketed VoIP service in Malaysia.

Essentially, the NSV is an IP phone adapter, which plugs up to 2 regular phone lines, connecting them to the Internet using existing modems or routers.

However, where the NSV is drastically different is that is is controlled my a central media gateway owned by nStream International, located in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, and Hong Kong.

Because of the gateway, nStream controls the end-to-end process, and thus delivering a better quality overall. This also means that all upgrade, maintenance and support work can be done remotely without ever needing to send a technician to your office.

Neat…

Inter Branch Calling

Below is an example of a plan I laid out for a client. Being an international shipping company, they has offices scattered around the globe, and usually paid in access of RM 6,000 a month for their phone bills…And I can tell you, they were EXREMELY excited seeing this. Who wouldn’t be when you are presented with a plan to eliminate inter-branch communication costs for a dirt cheap investment?

The nStream system can connect to any existing PBX/PABX easily, without the need for any other investment. For smaller or remote branches without a PBX, you can connect the phones directly to the NSV.

When you connect a branch with the NSV, you can call the branch using the virtual number provided with each NSV system, and the cost of the call would be zero.

How Can nStream Voice Help YOUR Business?

The nStream Voice IP Phone Adapter is suitable for any type of business, but is especially wonderful for connecting your offices or branches.

If your business has local / international branches, the NSV can help you reduce your cost by 100%. That means that inter-branch calling can literally be free, 24/7 to any destination in the world.

For outgoing calls to regular mobile and fixed lines, the simple but powerful nStream Voice system can help you reduce your phone bills by 40% - 70% immediately, and yet enjoy the best call quality to any destination in the world.

NSV also gives you all these incredible benefits:

Maintain Your Existing Phone Numbers
There is no need to change your existing phone numbers. The NSV works with any system, and even give you 2 additional numbers per set.

One World One Number
Each NSV comes with 2 virtual numbers. These virtual numbers are 100% portable and can be functional in any part of the world. In other words, you can bring your NSV anywhere you travel, and still enjoy the great benefits. No need to additional roaming charges.
Online Self-Care System
Your staff can monitor all activities and calls made in real-time, 24/7 with our efficient itemized billing system. Now you can have total control of your business costs.
24/7 Technical Support
Leave the worries of technology to us. Our friendly and experienced support staff are always ready to assist you.
FREE Upgrades and Value Added Services
Since the power of NSV s in our gateway, all future updates can be done remotely on our servers, and all you need to do is to reset the unit to enjoy the new features. Value added services include:

• Conference calls up to 30 participants
• Call forwarding
• Follow-me numbers
• Caller ID
• Voice message system (coming soon)
• Voice to Email (coming soon)
• WiFi compatibility (coming soon)

Updates on nStream Voice

Since early 2006, nStream Voice is no longer available. The partnership between nStream and Mobif proved to be less than all it was made out to be.

Mobif owns the technology, and are currently marketing the same ATA under a different name in Malaysia and elsewhere.

Offers plans starting at $49.95 a month for unlimited local and long distance calling to anyone in the U.S., Canada, and 17 countries in Western Europe.

Every Lingo business plan comes with a free dedicated fax line. Lingo includes 26 standard features including:

• Voicemail
• CallerID
• Call Forwarding
• 3 Way Calling
• Call Waiting
• Speed Dialing, etc..

Additional features include Universal Phone Numbers. Lingo will allow you to transfer your existing phone number to Lingo (where available). Lingo also offers businesses local telephone numbers in 15 different countries allowing you to have  a virtual presence in these particular countries.

In my opinion, this is the VoIP service that is best for businesses that make a lot of international telephone calls.

If you’re new to the world of Internet Telephony (or IP Telephony) then you’ve come to the right place. It seems like Internet Telephony is almost a buzz word by now and all the coverage and hype it gets in the media.

So what is Internet Telephony, really, and how can it affect your small business or home based business?

At the very basic level, it means telecommunication services and devices that use the Internet as a medium. Imagine all the phone services you use now, all the long distance calls, voice message services, call forwarding, etc.

Now imagine all these happening on the Internet, with or without the need for any physical phones, voice recorders and telephone lines… that’s IP telephony in a nutshell.

Definition of Internet Telephony

Here’s how the experts define it:

“Internet telephony is the conversion of analog speech signals used on current telephone systems into digital data, allowing calls to be sent over the Internet, bypassing long distance charges. While the Internet was first devised as a way of transmitting data, it is now being used to make voice calls. Internet telephony is projected to explode as the costs plummet.” [source]

“IP Telephony, also called ‘Internet telephony’, is the technology that makes it possible to have a telephone conversation over the Internet or a dedicated Internet Protocol (IP) network instead of dedicated voice transmission lines. This allows the elimination of circuit switching and the associated waste of bandwidth. Instead, packet switching is used, where IP packets with voice data are sent over the network only when data needs to be sent, i.e., when a caller is talking.” [source]

Internet Telephony and VoIP

Although these 2 things are often confused to be the same, there’s actually a difference. VoIP or Voice Over Internet Protocol is the technology that enables Internet telephony. VoIP is basically sending and receiving voice (phone conversations) through the Internet.

IP telephony, however, is more than just sending voice. It also covers fax messages, sending data, multimedia and other applications that combine all these components.

[+] More info on what is VoIP

Using IP telephony for you business has its advantages and disadvantages, although the latter seems to be reducing with time, as more complex and stable technology evolves to replace the feeble, unreliable ones.

Types of Internet Telephony

There are basically 5 types of Internet telephony, which are:

PC to PC
Internet telephony that operates 100% online and only between two PCs that are connected via the Internet.

PC to Phone
Making phone calls from your PC to a land line (fixed) phone number, a mobile phone number and toll-free numbers.

Device to Phone
Making phone calls from PDAs to a land line (fixed) phone number, a mobile phone number and toll-free numbers.

Phone to PC
A reverse of PC to phone, this type of Internet telephony enables people to make phone calls to your PC, without the need for a physical phone line or phone.

Phone to Phone
Basic telephony between two or more physical phones. This can be done either by using VoIP PBX, IP phones, or IP phone adapters.

VoIP technology has enabled telephony signals to run over dedicated networks using packet-switched protocols. One of the preferred methods of running VoIP services, like iconnecthere in the corporate sector is to use dedicated lines. Instead of being primarily dependent on the PSTN for its telephone service requirements, companies using VoIP protocols can send and receive telephone calls over their private computer networks.

Using iConnectThere or any other VoIP service, voice signals can be packetized in a manner similar to computer data packets.

VoIP includes the caller and receiver’s network addressing information in the packets sent over the network. If a given circuit on the network is down, VoIP packets can switch to another computer network circuit because the packet is not dependent on the circuit itself for directions.

In the previous example, the circuit-switched train is switched solely by the tracks it travels. If the train runs into a broken track, it can’t continue to travel to its destination. VoIP packets can have many alternative routes because the destination address inside the packet tells the network where to route the packet.

Most companies today use packet-switched networks for their computers and separate circuit-switched networks for their voice calls.

Voice over IP began as the result of work done by some hobbyists in Israel in 1995. They found a way to communicate with each other purely using their PCs, and hence PC-to-PC Internet telephony was born.

In 1995, Vocaltech was one of the first to introduce a software they boringly named (guess what)… Internet Phone Software…

Talk about lack of a creative imagination

As boring as it may sound, it was perhaps the first VoIP device to be able to utilize IP (Internet Protocol) technology over a longer distance by breaking the voice signals into small packets that were send over the Internet. When the packets reached it’s destination, it would re-assemble and hence re-forming the original voice signal.

A New Chapter in History for Voice Over IP

Came 1998, and more and more companies were setting up VoIP gateways to enable PC-to-Phone and Phone-to-Phone. The world realize for the first time the potential of VoIP, and the rest as they say, is history.

Over the years, new standards and protocols were developed. More and more end user services were being introduced. However, most of the work was small scale and not very commercial. At that point of time, VoIP was still ahead of it’s time, albeit by just a few years.

VoIP at that time was very dependent on the availability of high speed bandwidth and Internet connection, therefore the history of VoIP stayed out of the general public’s eye for some time.

According to Business Week (January 05), the time for VoIP has finally arrived in 2005, especially for small business owners like you and me. The bandwidth and high speed internet take-up has been incredible worldwide, and the technology has developed to the point where it is economically for business owners to make the switch safely and confidently.

Internet Telephony, The Next Generation

You may or may not be aware of it, but a study conducted showed that “One in Four International Calls is VoIP” (iLocus, Global VoIP Market).

You may be wondering, “Well if that’s true, how come I never heard about it?”

The answer to that is that for years, VoIP remained a telecommunication carrier’s dirty little secret. Every time you made an International or long distance phone call, these carriers were using VoIP to carry your calls to it’s destination. They cut down on costs drastically, while they still charged you the same, and you paid for it willingly, oblivious to the fact of what was happening “behind the scenes”…

The king of Internet search technology now also seeks to become the Internet phone champion? Not many have predicted this, until Google Inc. quietly released their beta version of GoogleTalk in August 2005.

The program is closely integrated with Gmail and you can use it instantly if you’re already a Gmail account user. If you’re not, and you don’t want a Gmail account, you can still request for an SMS verification code to use Google Talk.

Download Google Talk

According to BBC News, “At first glance, a combined instant messaging/net phone system is a strange service to launch mainly because Google’s rivals are so far ahead in terms of users and experience.

According to figures gathered by ComScore Media Metrix, America Online has more than 40 million users on its AIM and ICQ instant messaging networks. Yahoo has 20 million users and MSN Messenger has 14 million. Some of these services have been operating for more than a decade.

On net telephony, too, Google has a mountain to climb. The biggest net telephone (or voice over IP) service is run by Skype which currently claims to have 51 million users..

Google may have a leading share of the search market but it is a minnow when it comes to these two technologies.”

Apparently, there’s a reason for this late entry by Google. While most other PC-to-PC applications enable you to only call within their own network, Google plans to use Jabber technology to enable calling over different networks.

For now however, you can get a Jabber ID and use it for Google Talk and a host of other less popular pc-to-pc VoIP applications. You can get full details on this at gtalkprofile.com. Other major IM’s like MSN and Yahoo Messenger don’t support this protocol currently but who knows, maybe in the future a Skype or AOL user can call a Google Talk user for free…

Currently the beta release of GoogleTalk looks very simple and has some limitations:

• Only Windows version is available.
• Lacks tons of other feaures offered by other IM (Instant Messaging) services such as emoticons and file transfers
• No way to call to or from traditional telephone networks.
• No web cam or video component

How Does Google Talk Work?

The Google Talk phone is based on a software application that you can download and install on any Windows or Mac based PC. Other than a micro- phone and headphones, it has no need for any other hardware. Google Talk itself looks like any other instant messaging (IM) service like AOL Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, exept that it has a softphone, which looks like the image here.

As a matter of fact, it is similar to perhaps the more popular Internet phone application, Skype. Like Skype, Google Talk is a form of PC-to-PC VoIP which means that you’ll use your PC or laptop (notebook) which has an Internet connection to call another person who is also running a Google Talk softphone application for free.

To use Google Talk optimally you’ll need:

1. A PC or laptop running Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
2. Broadband internet connection
3. Headsets or a pair of headphone and microphone

Other Info Related to Google Talk

Skype VoIP Internet Phone
Read about Google Talk’s main competitor, Skype, with over 50 million users worldwide.

VoIP Headsets for Google Talk
Get a new headset and enjoy better experience in Internet telephony.

Phone Adapter for Google Talk and Skype
Use a phone adapter meant to use a real phone while making Skype or GoogleTalk calls.

Broadband Search Tool
No broadband or unhappy with your current one? Use our tool to find the perfect broadband solution.

Internet Telephony Basics
Learn about internet telephony in general.

VoIP Service Providers List
If you don’t want to use a PC to make internet phone calls, then see this list of great Phone-to-Phone services.

Do you know what the phone numbers mean? Why can’t you use those numbers what you would like? I mean, this was the past. And in the near future, you may not have to memorize 8 or 9 numbers. For example: if you are a Comcast VoIP user, your ’number’ will be something like this: COMCAST YOUR TOWN 9876. Let’s take a look at the history and the possibly future of the phone numbers.

In the 1940s, a consortium of leaders in the telecommunications industry and in government standardized how customers would be assigned telephone numbers. The telephone number identified a specific pair of wires out of millions of pairs of wires, and a specific phone company switch out of thousands of such devices. The term circuit-switched describes this setup of circuit wiring, switching devices, and telephone number assignment. The PSTN is sometimes referred to as the circuit-switched or switched network.

Because today’s public phone system is still circuit-switched, it still relies on the same basic system for telephone number assignment. VoIP introduced dramatic changes in how the network is used and, over time, VoIP could force changes in how numbers are assigned.
With VoIP, phone numbers are no longer tied to specific wires and switches. VoIP routes calls based on network addresses, and phone numbers are simply used because that is what people are familiar with. (VoIP takes care of translating a phone number into a network address.) In the future, as more and more people adopt VoIP-based systems, we may see dramatic changes in phone numbering.

Mention VoIP and the first thing that comes to mind is cheap voip calls. Although VoIP is more than just free or cheap calling, the cost savings afforded by VoIP is perhaps the main reason it has become so *hot* today.

Yet, may business owners think “All these VoIP cost savings must mean that it’s of poor quality”…

They couldn’t be further from the truth. Cheap VoIP calls has nothing to do with being of inferior quality or unreliable service. Instead, Voip cost savings is because of the nature of Internet telephony itself.

There are two “legs” to any phone call. One leg is on your side, where the call originates, and the other is on the receiver’s side, where the call is connected.

On a regular phone service you need to pay company A for allowing you to use their telecommunications network. You also need to pay company B (another state or country maybe) for their end of the communications line.

So in effect, you are paying two people for one phone call.

Since you are making a call via the Internet, you are charged very little (or none at all) for your side of the call.

If the person you’re also calling is using a similar device, your call could be free. This is also true for PC-to-PC VoIP calls. If the person you’re calling is using a regular phone line, or a mobile phone, then you have to pay for that, but still you get cheap VoIP calls.

Either way, VoIP cost savings is made possible because you only pay for the last mile, or leg B of the call. So it’s not about poor quality. It’s about the basic technology of VoIP.

Don’t I Have to Pay for the Internet?

Well, yes and no. What you’re actually paying your ISP is for the access to the Internet. You’re paying for their service which allows you to get connected to the Internet.

The Internet itself belongs to no one, and therefore, it’s free!

That’s why you can make cheap VoIP calls or even free VoIP calls when you are on PC-to-PC mode, since the call is made and received on the Internet.

This is the number one reason why VoIP cost savings is a significant benefit for your small business or home based business. Home based business owners, especially those involved in global marketing or telemarketing, would REALLY benefit from this!