VoIP vs landline for a business

A landline is powered from the line and terminates at one address. A cloud phone system is neither, which is why it can ring three people in two places and why it goes quiet when your power does. Most small businesses are better on the second. The case for the first is real, and it is short.

Almost every comparison of the two is written by somebody selling one of them, which is why they all read like a clean sweep. It is not a clean sweep. Below are the rows that genuinely go each way, and the four questions that decide it for a particular business.

A traditional copper line carries its own electricity. The pair coming into your building is powered from the phone company's end, so a plain corded handset works during a blackout with nothing plugged into a wall socket. That is not a feature somebody added. It is how the thing was built, and no cloud service can copy it, because a cloud call needs a router, a switch and a phone, and all three need power from your building.

A copper line also terminates at an address. One pair, one socket, one bell. That is a limitation for almost everything a growing business wants to do, and it is the reason the line is dependable: nothing about it changes because somebody in the next room started a backup.

Everything else on both sides follows from those two facts. If the cloud side of the comparison is the unfamiliar one, what VoIP is and how it works sets out what replaced the line, the switch and the carrier, and why the power question falls out of that.

A power cut. Corded handset, copper pair, dial tone. This is worth checking rather than assuming, because a lot of what people call a landline today is not one. If your phone service arrives through the same box as your internet, from a cable or fiber company, it is not copper and it stops when the box does.

An internet outage. Your connection can fail on its own without the power going anywhere, and a copper line does not notice. A cloud phone system notices immediately.

Consistency. A landline sounds the same every day. A cloud call is as good as the room left on your connection at that moment, which is why how much bandwidth a call actually needs is worth working out before anyone tells you it will be fine.

Two of those three are about staying up when something else has failed, and they are the reason a lot of businesses keep exactly one copper line: the alarm panel, the elevator phone, or a handset in the back that nobody uses until the day they need it.

The regulator treats this as the defining difference, and wrote a rule about it. Under 47 CFR 9.20, backup power obligations, a provider of fixed residential voice service that is not line powered has to offer subscribers the option to buy backup power at the point of sale: at least one option giving eight hours of standby power, and, since 13 February 2019, at least one giving twenty-four. The rule says the backup has to cover every piece of the provider's equipment on the premises that has to stay powered for the service to reach 911.

Read what that rule takes for granted. It exists only because the service is not line powered, and it applies to residential service, not to yours. Nobody is required to hand a business a battery. If you want your phones to survive a blackout on a cloud system, that is a small uninterruptible power supply under the desk that holds up the router, the switch and one phone, bought by you, sized by you, and tested once a year by unplugging it.

One call can be offered to more than one person. A landline rings a bell in a room. A cloud system can ring the front desk and a workshop and somebody's cell phone at once, or in an order, or only the people who handle that kind of call. This is the whole difference between a phone that makes noise and a phone that reaches somebody.

A second number costs a line on the invoice, not a second install.

Adding a person takes an afternoon, not a visit.

Moving is unplugging. A landline move means new wiring, a new install date and, if you cross a boundary, often a new number. A cloud move means putting the phones in a box and plugging them in at the other end.

You can change what callers hear yourself. Hours, holidays, the menu, the greeting. On most landline setups that is a call to whoever installed the box.

1. Does more than one person need to be able to answer the main number? If yes, the landline is already the wrong tool, and no amount of reliability makes up for a call reaching a room nobody is in.
2. How bad is a two-hour outage? For a clinic taking bookings, annoying. For a locksmith or an emergency plumber, it is the business. That answer decides whether you keep a copper line, buy a battery, arrange a forward, or all three.
3. Is your internet good enough, and do you know or are you guessing? A connection that streams fine can still be a poor place to put calls.
4. Are you moving or growing in the next three years? Every landline advantage is about staying still, and every cloud advantage is about not having to.

Run the phone system in the cloud and buy back the two things you gave up. A battery under the desk covers the short blackout. A forward configured at the provider, in advance, covers the connection failing. One copper line, if you have a reason for one, covers the rest.

That is a more honest arrangement than either side's marketing, and it is cheaper than most people expect. What it costs depends on how many people need a licence rather than on how many people work there, which is the part that catches people out and is worked through in the true cost of a business phone system.

We do not sell copper lines, we cannot install one, and we have no office anywhere to send somebody from. Numbers are provisioned by hand rather than bought from a page. There is no self-serve signup here: setup is done with you.

More on the basics is on the VoIP basics topic page. What a seat costs is on the pricing page.