What is VoIP? A plain-English guide for business owners

VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, which is a terrible name for a simple idea. It means your phone calls travel over your internet connection instead of down a copper telephone line.

That is the whole concept. Everything else follows from it.

Why that one change matters so much

On the old network, a phone call travelled down a specific physical wire to a specific building. Your desk phone was wired back to a box in a cupboard, and that box was wired out to the phone network. The cable was the call.

That is why an office extension was welded to one desk. The desk is where the cable went. If you wanted your extension to ring somewhere else, someone had to run a new cable.

Once a call is just data, it can go anywhere your internet goes. Your extension can ring on your desk phone, on your laptop at home and on your mobile in the van, all at the same time, because none of those things need a wire running back to your office.

What a business notices day to day

Nothing in a cupboard. The clever part of the phone system lives on your provider’s servers. You do not own it, maintain it, or pay to replace it when it becomes obsolete in six years.

No fixed limit on calls. A single old analogue line carried exactly one call. If someone rang while you were on the phone, they got an engaged tone and rang a competitor instead. That constraint disappears.

Staff can be anywhere. Home, second site, in a van, in another country. Same number, same ability to transfer calls.

Features stop being extras. Voicemail arriving in your inbox as an email, call recording, an automated “press 1 for sales” menu. On an old system these were paid modules that often needed an engineer to enable. Now they are just switched on.

Changes happen in software. A new starter is a line in a config screen rather than a cabling job and an invoice.

What it needs from your broadband

Less than people expect. A single call uses roughly a tenth of a megabit in each direction. A connection that streams video without complaint will carry a lot of simultaneous calls without noticing.

Bandwidth is almost never the problem. Consistency is. A connection that is fast on average but drops packets will produce calls that break up, and no amount of extra speed fixes that. This is why a decent provider checks your line before quoting rather than after installing.

If someone tells you that moving to internet calling means you must also buy their broadband, be sceptical. Sometimes it is true. Usually it is not.

The one thing worth planning for

If your internet goes down, your desk phones go with it. This is the honest downside and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.

The answer is a routing rule: if the office connection drops, calls automatically go to mobiles instead. Set up properly, an outage becomes an inconvenience nobody outside the business notices, rather than a day of missed calls.

Worth keeping in perspective, though. Old copper systems went down too, when the line was cut or the box failed, and they had no equivalent fallback at all. A backhoe through the cable meant silence until an engineer arrived.

How this connects to the switch-off

The copper network that traditional landlines run on is being switched off across the UK on 31 January 2027. After that date, businesses still on a traditional landline or an on-site phone system connected to copper have no service.

So for most businesses this stopped being a question of whether VoIP is worth it, and became a question of when to move and who to move with. The full explanation of the switch-off is here, and the switch-off checker will tell you where you stand in about thirty seconds.

What it costs

Our hosted phone system is £10 per phone per month, or £15 with unlimited UK landline and mobile calls, with every feature included. Full pricing here, no quote form required.