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Small businesses throughout the country continue to look for cost saving measures to take, that will not compromise the quality of service they provide to their customers. One area that has seen particular focus is to move away from traditional landline phone networks.

Whilst competition over the last twenty years has seen phone services improve and become more cost effective, landlines still represent a considerable monthly outlay. With hosted services incurring additional fees too, costs can really spiral.

The seaside town of Eastbourne is set to benefit from a new high speed fibre optic broadband network. The new network will provide businesses across the town with a potential download speed of up to one Gigabit per second.

The new network is to be provided via a special arrangement involving Eastbourne Borough Council.

A major recruitment company in the UK has all but finalized the implementation of a cutting edge IP (internet protocol) telephony system across its 50 branches nationwide.

Meridian Business Support, which deals in recruitment in areas as diverse as construction, education, and health, decided to roll out its new IP telephony system nationally in stages from the end of 2010, following a successful trial carried out in 2009.

Take up of hosted IP telephony and hosted business VoIP is expected to grow significantly over the next decade, according to a new report on the future development of telephony, communications, and business phone systems in the US by research organisation Companies and Markets.

Whilst the report notes that some IP (internet protocol) telephony and business VoIP (voice over internet protocol) services will still be implemented on-site using bought-in hardware, it predicts that the provision of IP telephony and business VoIP via a remote host such as a specialist business VoIP provider, or a VoIP reseller, will account for 20% of total business telephony by 2020.

One of the largest insurance companies in the United States has adopted a new cutting edge internet protocol (IP) telephony system covering both its headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana, and its office in Phoenix, Arizona.

MJ Insurance, which specialises in commercial assurance policies, selected its new IP telephony system following complications in locating replacement business phone systems components for its previous exchange.

Business VoIP handset manufacturer Yealink has introduced an upgraded version of its popular videophone model, the Elite.

Yealink says its new model, the VP2009 Elite, benefits from significant improvements on existing Elite features, as well as introducing some welcome additional functions.

Durham University is to embark on a major overhaul of its entire internal communications infrastructure; a move which, in common with many modern business phone systems, will also encompass the implementation of a new state of the art internet protocol (IP) telephony system.

The new communications infrastructure is expected to be in place across the entire university by 2013, with the aim of providing the institution’s entire population of 15,000 students and 3,000 staff with the highest quality information technology and telecommunications facilities.

A new report claims that softphone acquisition is likely to rise sharply over the next six years, with a global market expected to be worth $217.2 million by 2017; the equivalent of 2.9 million unit sales.

Softphones permit the transmission and reception of voice calls via a desktop computer or laptop, without the need for any conventional telephony hardware. They are already used fairly extensively in many call centres.

With the UK government ‘s efforts to help stimulate high speed broadband access in rural areas now in full swing, some critics claim that businesses in some urban areas will also be left without broadband unless a similar urban incentive package is offered.

The government’s rural broadband funding scheme, overseen by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), was established because of fears that without such financial incentives, private broadband infrastructure companies would consider such rural broadband provision uneconomic.

Business VoIP is now at its most economically accessible, and can now be implemented easily by all firms, both large and small. This is the recent view expressed by Mike Eagle, general manager of the Federation of Communication Services (FCS) in the US.

According to Eagle, not only has the cost of business VoIP (voice over internet protocol) come down substantially, but there are now many more complete service packages available; all of which, he says, makes business VoIP a viable and accessible option for small and medium sized enterprises(SMEs) as well as larger corporate players.