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VoIP Provider4 VoIP Features Telus Won’t Tell You About
For most of Vancouver’s history, if your business needed a phone line there was one place to get it. That is no longer true, and four things in particular changed.
Telus was the default, not the best option
For decades a Vancouver business that needed phone service had one realistic supplier. The incumbent local carrier held the copper, and everything a small business wanted ran through it. When your customers have nowhere else to go, there is very little pressure to give great customer service or build features they might like.
Competition arrived through regulation rather than technology. Once the CRTC opened local service to competitors, independent providers could build their own networks and sell directly to small businesses. VoIP is what those providers built on, and it took most of the 2000s before call quality was good enough that anyone should have trusted it with a business line. It is well past that point now.
Worth knowing before you compare quotes: Telus Business Connect is not a Telus platform. It is RingCentral, resold under the Telus name through a long-running partnership between the two companies.
That matters because the support you reach, the feature roadmap, and the platform your calls run on all belong to a company you did not choose and cannot escalate to.
The four features
Your phone works anywhere there is internet
A traditional line is wired to a building and to an on-premise PBX. A VoIP handset is not. Plug it into any high-speed connection and it rings on your office number, whether that connection is at a second location, a home office, or a job site. If someone works from a different address three days a week, that is a configuration detail rather than a new phone line.
One caution the marketing usually skips: taking a handset outside Canada breaks the address registered against it for 911. If a phone is going to live abroad for any length of time, tell your provider so emergency routing is handled properly.
Office calls follow you to your mobile
You are not always at your desk when the call you have been waiting for comes in. Unanswered calls can ring your mobile, another office, or several devices at once, so the caller reaches a person instead of a voicemail box. Your business number is what they see and what they call back, so your personal mobile number stays private.
Voicemail arrives as email
Instead of dialling in, entering a PIN and working through messages in order while writing down a phone number you will have to replay twice, the message lands in your inbox as an audio file with the caller ID attached. You can read who called at a glance, listen in any order, and forward a message to whoever should handle it.
No PBX hardware in your closet
Traditional systems need an on-premise PBX to handle routing and greetings. It is expensive to buy, it needs a technician to change anything, and it eventually becomes a box nobody wants to touch. Hosted PBX moves all of that onto the provider’s network and includes it in the monthly plan, so changing a greeting or adding an extension is something you do yourself in a browser.
What this means if you are with Telus now
Most businesses that move to us come from Telus, and the reasons they give are consistent: hold times, invoices they cannot read, and features that either cost extra or do not exist. Independent VoIP costs less than a legacy line for most small businesses, but the number depends on how many seats you have and what you are paying today, so ask for a comparison against your current bill rather than trusting a percentage on a website.
If you want to see the detail, our plans and pricing and full feature list are both public, with no form required. Our Vancouver team can also look at your current invoice and tell you plainly whether switching is worth it.