Questions Small Business Owners Should Ask A VoIP Service Provider

Before you sign a contract for your VoIP services you should make sure you know the answers to the following questions:

These are all questions to ask the provider face-to-face. Your communications system is probably vital to your success, so you can't afford to just hope it all works out right in the end.

If the answers to these questions don't satisfy you, then it's best to just keep shopping around rather than regretting, later, that you went with an incompetent provider.

Q   What are the startup costs beyond normal setup and equipment fees? Besides the advertised basic equipment, what else will you really need? Do you need to buy special phones? Will there be any other add-ons needed to actually meet your business needs?

A good-looking deal with basic equipment priced attractively is often for a minimum configuration. You may find out later that you need more servers, cards, fax modules or even special phones – some quotes will include everything and some won't.

Q   Can you use the old-style analog phones you already have installed? If you have offices that already have a decent system of analog phones you should know that some provider systems will work with them and some won't. Being able to use them could save you a hundred dollars or more per phone.

Q   What day-to-day usage costs are not covered by the service plan? While home users rarely get charged extra for features like conference calling, call forwarding, some forms of long-distance and other items - small business packages are billed differently by some providers.

Make sure they don't charge extra fees for the features you normally use. Make a quick model of your actual phone usage and ask about all the items on the list so you can determine your actual costs.

Q   What will it cost to upgrade? In a year or two, or if you do under-estimate your requirements there will be additional costs to upgrade. It may pay to plan ahead for that and over-buy the equipment now, when you can bargain for a better price, rather than later when you may have to pay full price... and 'activating' service upgrades as you need them.

Q   What is the contract termination policy? What is the penalty for early termination? And are there any other termination costs?

A long-term contract is pretty standard in the industry - and not just from the VoIP providers. Unfortunately, some (most?) contracts include excessive early-termination penalties. You don't have to agree to them though, you can demand that the early termination penalties be removed from the contract, and most providers will go along to save the sale.

Q   Do they provide full 911 or E911 emergency services? How will dispatchers know your location if you need to call 911?

This is something that many VoIP providers don't like to talk about... fact is that many areas simply don't have the infrastructure in place to handle emergency VoIP calls without some fairly cumbersome hardware work-arounds. The good news is that this is a known issue and everyone involved is working on the solution.

Q   Do you guarantee the Quality of Service? Who do you contact for support and how fast will it happen? If the system goes down for any reason will you be compensated in any way?

Q   How do you know they will still be around two years from now? Telecommunications in general is an aggressive industry, with companies going under or merging or consolidating... make sure that any contract you enter into is binding even if your provider is acquired by another company.

For more about specific VoIP Service Providers for Small Business, visit the Service Providers page.