Are you dreading that next phone bill?
Least Cost Routing [LCR] provides a set of rules for your phone system, to enable it to guide outgoing calls over different lines, so that you can take advantage of the lowest call tariffs offered by different carriers, for your calls to local, national, international and mobile numbers.
Our 3CX and Yeastar phone systems excel at this, simply because you can connect almost all line types, from almost all network carriers. 3CX & Yeastar will connect; analogue lines, digital ISDN2, digital ISDN30, GSM mobile channels, Skype accounts and Internet SIP Trunks. Gateway ‘boxes’ are required to terminate analogue, ISDN and mobile lines – but the most cost-effective SIP Trunk channels only require the 3CX to be connected to Internet through a DSL service terminated by a router.
There are no practical limits on the number of SIP Trunk line groups that are configured into a 3CX or Yeastar IP-PBX system. This means that you can choose SIP Trunk suppliers (and if you Google that term, you’ll see ‘about 251,000 results’!), based on their monthly channel rental, and their tariff rates for calls into geographical areas where you do business.
By carrying out some simple analysis of your phone bills, we can look at the types of calls you make, how many, and what those calls are costing you per minute. This allows us to get a fairly accurate return on investment (RoI), figure that enables us and choose Carriers to create trunk groups to carry your different types of calls, at the best rates!
For example, you may have an extremely ‘friendly’ rate for calls to mobiles via the analogue lines you have, but our SIP Trunk lines could reduce your UK and local call rates by half! You may be opening up a business partnership with a company in Indonesia and therefore, a SIP Trunk supplier with low-cost calls to that region would be of advantage. Typically however, carriers work in a way where they provide a low cost for some services, at the expense of others … our IP-PBX systems can use that to your advantage – choosing just the best tariffs from each carrier! If your phone numbers are registered with a Carrier that does not give a good call rate, you could even configure your IP-PBX to accept calls on their lines, but make outgoing calls on another Carrier’s trunk-lines with a lower tariff.
3CX can terminate the line groups, and you can determine the number of ‘channels’ you might like for each. For example, two analogue lines may be enough to cover your calls to mobiles, eight SIP Trunk channels may be OK to call local & UK numbers, and just two channels are needed for those calls to Indonesia.
A table of rules is created to determine which way to route outgoing calls depending on the number dialed. In our example, a call commencing ‘07’ may be routed via your analogue lines which give the best rate for calls to mobiles. A call to a number commencing ‘0062’ would be routed through the SIP Trunk group giving the best rate to Indonesia, and six-digit local calls, or 11-digit national calls commencing ‘0’ – will use the SIP Trunk group giving best UK rates. These rules can also provide fall-backs so that e.g. if you have all of your lines to mobiles in use, the call will not be blocked, but simply take the next-best route to carry the call.
A further advantage is that these trunk-lines are configured in software and are virtual within your DSL connection. Therefore, it is quick and easy to either change carrier, or add another carrier to take advantage of tariff changes.
3CX & Yeastar systems provide Least Cost Routing benefits, due to their following features:
- the ability to terminate many different types of physical and virtual line groups
- the ability to terminate multiple line groups
- its ability to work with different SIP Trunk Carriers
- its ability to identify dialed digits and use them to route calls
- and – its ability to fall-back to 2nd and 3rd choice routes.
Contact Foxhall Solutions at 01787 228 402 – to talk about how Least Cost Routing can reduce your business costs.
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