What actually happens when an office moves to a cloud phone system

If you run a small business and somebody has been telling you to move your phones to the cloud, you have probably heard a long list of features and not much about what the change actually feels like. The features are mostly true and mostly beside the point. The thing that matters is where the phones are plugged in.

The old arrangement, in plain terms

A traditional office phone system is hard wired. Lines come into the building and land on equipment in a closet, and from that equipment a dedicated cable runs to every handset. The system knows that extension 204 is a specific pair of wires going to a specific spot on the wall. That is why moving a desk has historically meant calling somebody out: the phone is not really at the desk, it is at the end of a wire, and the wire has to be changed.

There is nothing wrong with this. Plenty of these systems have run for decades without complaint, which is exactly why so many are still in service.

What changes

A cloud system runs over your computer network instead. The handset plugs into the same kind of network outlet a computer would, and the identity of the extension lives in software rather than in a pair of copper wires.

That one change is where nearly all the practical benefit comes from. Moving a handset to a different desk stops being a service call, because you unplug it, carry it, and plug it in somewhere else. Adding a desk is a matter of having a network outlet there. And because the extension is not tied to a physical line in your building, somebody can take their extension with them and work somewhere else without the caller knowing or caring.

What this asks of your building

There is a trade here that gets glossed over in most sales conversations. When the phones move onto the network, the network becomes the phone system. It is no longer a thing that being slow makes a bit annoying. If it drops, the phones drop.

In practice that means the cabling matters more after a switch than it did before:

• Every desk that needs a phone needs a network outlet that actually works, terminated at both ends and tested.
• The switch those phones land on needs to be able to power them, and needs to be somewhere sensible rather than balanced on a shelf.
• Voice is far less tolerant of a congested or poorly built network than email or file sharing, because you hear the problem immediately.
• The phones should be on a wired connection, not sharing the office Wi-Fi with everything else in the building.

None of that is a reason to avoid a cloud system. It is a reason to have somebody look at the cabling as part of the same job, rather than discovering it afterwards.

You may not have to replace everything

The other thing worth knowing is that a switch is not always all or nothing. Plenty of businesses call because one part of the system has failed, or because they have outgrown the number of extensions, not because everything is broken. There is often a path that keeps what is working and changes what is not.

5E Communications sells and installs ESI systems and still works on Nortel and Norstar M&S equipment. That combination matters more than it sounds: a shop that only sells new systems has one recommendation available to it, and a shop that can still service what you have can afford to tell you when replacing it is not yet worth it.

Questions worth asking before you commit

• Who is responsible for the cabling and the network, and is that part of this quote or a separate job you will find out about later?
• What happens to the numbers you already publish, and how long does moving them take?
• What stays working during the changeover, and on which day does it happen?
• Who answers the phone when something goes wrong after the install, and is it the same people who did the work?
• If part of the current system is fine, does it have to be replaced, and why?

That last one is the most useful question you can ask anybody, and the answer tells you a lot about who you are dealing with.

The honest summary

A cloud phone system is a good fit for a business that moves people around, that adds and removes desks, or that has anybody working away from the building. It is a weaker argument for an office where nothing has moved in ten years and the existing system does everything asked of it.

5E Communications has been installing phone systems out of a shop on South Fannin in Amarillo since 2006, for businesses across the Texas Panhandle. If you want somebody to look at what you have and say plainly whether it is worth changing, call (806) 674-6900.