This year is a big transitional one for voice communications – or at least, for anyone who’s been dragging their feet over the switch to shiny new VoIP systems, it should be. In 2025 the UK’s old-school 50V bell-ringing telephone network is officially being shut down. This means no more rotary-dial Bakelite phones; soon it’s going to be IP or nothing. And in an age when workers are increasingly reliant on domestic telephony to stay connected to the office network, this brings up some definite issues.
■ How smart is your phone?
Once you start shopping around for home VoIP phones you might be surprised to find there’s a huge market out there – and it’s awash with very similar-looking desktop objects at heavily divergent prices. In fact, a fully featured, top-end, VoIP-capable phone set will cost more than your laptop, while doing a great deal less.
The fact is that the phone business is a lot older than the computer business, and it has quite a different character. It’s always been the territory of the contractual sales pitch, and the proprietary, call-an-engineer style of device support. Even where the systems are themselves eminently fiddle-friendly, you’ll still find a lot of sellers aren’t exactly bending over backwards to be accommodating.
This is a shame, because many small business-friendly phones (from brands such as Snom or Mitel) can in reality be set up by anyone sitting at home using a basic router to access the host phone system – be it up in the cloud or back at the office behind
