Leader: VoIP and SMEs - a good match?

A recent survey shows that small businesses are nonplussed by VoIP - the vast majority have not deployed it and fail to see why they should.

While vendors see this as a challenge to 'educate' a new market about the joys of IP telephony, many of these SMEs are right.

There are of course several forms a VoIP deployment can take, including new equipment or a complete network overhaul. One of the simplest options, however, is software such as Skype - which recently unveiled its business product - or similar offerings from the likes of AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo!.

Just download these applications, buy a few headsets and your business can make free phone calls, right?

Not quite. You have to look at the total cost, which for VoIP includes your broadband bill, as 'softphones' can use up considerable amounts of data especially when multiple users are making calls simultaneously. This can quickly add up and require said SME to shell out more money for a higher bandwidth line.

This is less of a concern for the smallest businesses of a dozen or so employees who aren't on the phone a lot but more of a worry for medium-sized companies or for certain businesses such as call centres.

Skype knows this and has never touted its product as a true enterprise-class solution. But even in the market it's going after - small businesses - remembering to factor in broadband costs could give many SMEs pause.

Adding to this, earlier this week we reported that - despite the arrival of 20Mbps broadband to the home - most people have a connection of 2Mbps or less. And that's download speed. The upload speeds, which softphones are limited by, are about a quarter of that or less. Bandwidth is not as plentiful as we sometimes think.

In the end, IP telephony is only interesting - for cost savings and usability - when you have spare IP bandwidth and intermittent traffic. The former is particularly hard for cost-sensitive small businesses to come by.

We can't stress enough how individual a choice an organisation's telecoms solution must be - what works for one SME isn't necessarily right for another. But in educating small businesses about VoIP, it would be good to let them know it's not free. Sometimes, it's not even all that cheap.