VOIP & PBX Hardware and Configuration
TrueVoice, which is commercially known as VOIP or Voice over IP, is a fairly new development that has only become well known over the past 4 years. This technology allows you to make a normal voice telephone call over an Internet connection – which directly means lower prices as minimal additional infrastructure is needed to offer a Voice service – hence the lower prices we are able to offer.
To explain the high call rates even further: The largest contributing factor to high voice call charges in South Africa is a term called Interconnect – and refers to the rates the large voice companies charge one another to route calls between them. So, for us to place a call to Telkom, we have to pay Telkom a fee per minute. The inflow of more voice providers and especially VOIP providers has put pressure on the Interconnect system and has driven prices down - predominantly through government intervention. Hopefully we will see Interconnect driven down even further!
The biggest cost saver on the TrueVoice network is that all calls to other TrueVoice users are mahala – yes they’re for free – and not just some times – all the time - 24/7!
In addition to our VOIP services, we also offer PBX (private branch exchange) solutions. This is a private telephone network, used by most medium-sized and larger businesses because it's much less expensive than connecting an external telephone line to every telephone in the organization. We offer PBX services under 2 main options: Hosted PBX, where the PBX functionality is provided by our equipment and managed by us – all you have to do is purchase the telephone handsets. There is a range of services which could be used, such as IVR, ring-groups, queues, etcetera. The second PBX option would be to purchase your own PBX, which would be a better option for those with larger installations and those that want more direct control over their telephone systems. We make use of open source IP based PBX systems as part of this solution. These systems can consist of as few as 2 handsets and as large as a couple of hundred handsets, with full PBX functionality.