he last few months at Nubrek Inc. have been busy. Although we handled an influx of business, hired and trained new employees, and settled into new office space, what really threw us for a loop was unreliable phone service: We experienced poor line quality and disconnections.

We sought a new phone service provider and found many different options available. One of particular interest is Voiceover Internet protocol, or VoIP. Following is information on many of the VoIP providers, some tips on how to compare them and a number of online resources.

VoIP Phone Service 411

We all know the importance of having affordable and dependable phone service. For most of us in the merchant services industry, the phone is more than a communication device, it's a sales tool. We need to call a sales lead across town and a processor across the country in the same day, without worrying about the quality of the connection.

Phone service is broken down and billed under many different categories: local, long distance, voicemail, conference calling, call waiting, caller-ID, etc. In addition to these services, many of us also pay for cell phones, pagers, Blackberry devices and Internet connections. Local providers, such as Comcast or Qwest, sell bundled service packages for businesses. They offer local and long distance calling, as well as Internet, cellular and cable service. I have found our local service to be rather expensive.

However, local providers might be the right choice for an ISO or merchant level salesperson who works from home, has lower call volumes and makes mostly local calls. Local providers offer the benefit of keeping all charges in one billing statement. Thanks to the Internet, new and less expensive phone service options are now available.

Broadband users (high-speed Internet) have many VoIP service providers from which to choose. For example, Vonnage, Packet8, BroadVoice, AT&T CallVantage and SpeakEasy are a few.

VoIP services send calls through an analog telephone adapter (ATA) and over your Internet connection without relying on a physical phone network (e.g., BellSouth, SBC or Qwest). This option requires a broadband Internet connection such as cable or a digital subscriber line (DSL), a home router and a service adapter available from the service provider.

The advantage of using a VoIP solution is that the market is very competitive. While there are relatively few companies from which to choose for normal phone service, many VoIP providers will gladly offer VoIP phone service at a very competitive rate and with unlimited long distance.

Review Your Current Service

Phone service features indispensable to the merchant services industry, such as voicemail, conferencing and call waiting, allow business to flow smoothly and efficiently. How do you decide if a VoIP solution is best for your business?

One of the first steps when analyzing your current service is to decide what features your business needs. Does it need multiple lines to accommodate the sales force? What about a toll free number for customer service? Make a list of all the features your office uses and think about others you might want to try. Features we use at Nubrek are:

• Receiving voicemail in our e-mail inbox
• Receiving fax's in our e-mail inbox
• Free conference calling
• Unlimited long distance
• Low-cost 877 number
• Call following (the call rings different phones until it finds you)
• Automated call attendant, menus and call direction (Leads and customers always hear a friendly voice and can select the department with which they wish to speak.)

The next step is to make an estimate of all intrastate (in- state), interstate (state-to-state) and international calls. An easy way to estimate these numbers is to view a recent phone bill. You might be surprised at how large or small your call volume actually is. If you rely heavily on fax machines, consider the number of incoming and outgoing faxes. As you review these numbers, remember to consult growth projections for the rest of the year.

Go Comparison Shopping

Now that we've established which features are essential to your business, it's time to go comparison shopping:

VoIP Comparison Reviews
www.voipreview.org

VoIPReview does a good job comparing feature sets from each of the providers. Its user reviews seem a bit skewed, but otherwise the site looks good.

ZDNet Reviews

http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/4520-9140_16-5131559-1.html

ZDNet usually has objective reviews. Read through its commentary on any of the providers you are considering.

Google
www.google.com

I'm sure most of you already do this, but once you've figured out what you're looking for, perform a search on companies on Google to see what others have said about it.

If you're willing to do a bit more work, contact various providers and create your own comparison chart. I began my research by visiting www.voipreview.org . The site offers VoIP facts and reviews of various broadband phone service providers. I compared the business plans for three different providers and researched the various features offered with each plan. Also, make sure your current Internet connection can handle VoIP calls. The Web site www.testyourvoip.com will evaluate and score your Internet connection. You'll know if it makes sense to run your phone traffic over your broadband connection.

The Perks of VoIP

One of the greatest things we enjoy at Nubrek is the simplification of our phone bills. If you're like me, the phone bills you've seen are unnecessarily confusing. Bills from Qwest and BellSouth are extremely difficult to read and contest.

Other benefits include:

• Reduced fees and taxes. Many of the fees you pay for standard phone service aren't required with VoIP providers. At Nubrek we see only about 10% in taxes and fees on our VoIP phone bills, while local carriers usually impose 20% - 25% in taxes.

• Portability. We were also able to complete an office move without the complications of scheduling downtime for our phones or arranging for new numbers.

• Fixed billing amounts. Since long distance is unlimited, our phone bill is always the same, which makes it a much easier cost to manage.

The Tradeoffs

While all these features are great, they aren't without a tradeoff or two. Recently, VoIP providers such as Vonnage have come under fire for not providing appropriate 911 service. Another complexity with VoIP service: It shares Internet usage with many other services. Web browsing, e-mail and all sorts of other services share the same data pipe. Most providers prioritize voice data over other data forms, but sometimes this isn't enough. Phone call quality can drop.

Other downsides: Some of the VoIPs aren't able to transfer the phone numbers you currently use. With all the required equipment, there is more room for hardware error. Whenever our Internet line experiences an outage our phones do as well. We've also stumbled over a few call quality issues in the past.(Recently, we had to replace our ATA because we thought it was the reason we had poor service.)

I do think that investing in a quality small business VoIP product is well worth any of the tradeoffs for Nubrek. A few of our eISO customers, who contact new leads, prospects, existing customers, banks, processors and vendors every day, said they felt confident in their decision to implement a business VoIP solution. Before abandoning your existing phone service, order one or two phone lines from a provider of choice. Try it out, have one of your reps use it for a month, and see what he or she thinks.

Analyzing phone service is often a real headache. However, unreliable line quality, which results in poor customer service and huge monthly bills are even worse. In the end, I followed the advice of one of our ISOs in Texas that signed up with Packet8 and highly recommended it.

Right now we're in the test phase before we transfer the rest of our numbers over. I'm confident that this provider has the feature set we need; we simply want to ensure this solution will address our business needs and our customers' satisfaction moving forward.

Joel Rydbeck, Chief Executive Officer of Nubrek Inc., brings his strong background in e-commerce and business process automation to the merchant services industry. Nubrek offers eISO, a Web application for ISOs that tracks leads and provides automated residual and commission reports. For a free demo of eISO, go to www.nubrek.com/demo/eiso.html or visit www.nubrek.com for more information. E-mail Rydbeck at joel@nubrek.com .