Whether you’ve been kicking around the idea of switching over to VoIP Broadband Phone Service or you’ve never even heard of it before, if you’re interested in increasing both the quality of your phone service and the money that stays in your bank account, then listen up. As I see it, here are just some of the reasons why you should lose all of your current phone services in favor of VoIP over both traditional land line and cellular services:

With Voice over Internet Protocol phone service, you will no longer have a need for your land line phones any longer. Now I’m not telling you to rip out your old phones and throw them in the trash, yet. The technology is still in somewhat of a transitional period and you may need to find a way to use both services while getting used to a new system, but soon enough you will find that your old system is no longer needed. VoIP phone service will also eliminate the need for any long distance services you currently have and will save you money by dropping these expensive services and, eventually, your land line service altogether.

Communications with VoIP are unlimited. Once you choose which VoIP service provider you’re going to go with you will be put on a flat rate service where you can have unlimited communications worldwide. Depending on your equipment, many service providers don’t even charge extra for international calls. But even the ones that do, their fees are next to nothing compared to what you were paying for the same services with traditional land line and cell phone services.

Conference calling is no longer limited, either. Previous 3-way calling service found with land line and cellular phones are no longer limited to just you and maybe 2 other people on the conversation. Now you can have as many as you want on the call because virtually all VoIP service providers offer a better solution. Since the internet is used as the method of delivery with VoIP service, technology is no longer 2-dimensional. Using VoIP phone service for both conference calls and teleseminars is relatively simple which makes it an excellent idea for business.

VoIP service is cheap: But not in the sense of not being worth what you pay for it. You will definitely be getting more than your money’s worth. Why, even the most expensive of VoIP service providers are much less expensive than traditional services. By eliminating the middlemen and others that have a hand in helping to provide you with your current services, VoIP can bring your costs down dramatically. In addition, since your connection is established and maintained through the internet you don’t have to worry about the need for it to have to go through land based wiring systems that are in need of constant repairs, maintenance and upgrades. Now initially there may be some small additional charges when the person on the other end of the line you need to talk to is still using a land line or cell phone service (at least until they wise up and get VoIP) because the need for the “middleman” still exists. Just be sure to check with your chosen provider for any rates that may apply.

No additional costs for Internet services – Service packages offered by most VoIP providers allow you to save money on your broadband service from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) by providing you with the same quality service included in your VoIP service plan. By going with a VoIP service provider that offers the option of broadband Internet service, too, you will save more money by being able to get rid of the added expense of a separate ISP.

There are all kinds of free services and features with VoIP – Many VoIP service providers don’t even charge you to use their services at all. For example, since VoIP operates using your computer’s broadband technology, if the person you need to talk to has VoIP, too, all you need to do is activate your VoIP service and that’s it because most with most VoIP service providers computer to computer calls are free. By eliminating the need to pay for the rental fees of cell towers or land lines there are no expenses involved when placing calls over the internet to someone else with VoIP service. In addition, many of the features you would normally have to pay extra for with traditional services like caller ID, call waiting, three-way calling, call forwarding, voice mail, etc., are included and already set up for you in most packages available from your VoIP provider. Many of these features were rarely even used with the other types of services because there were always additional fees that were charged for them. Once you acquire these features along with your VoIP service and begin using them, you will be asking yourself how you ever did without them. Once again, always be sure that you check with your provider for the services and features included with your plan and any rates that may apply.

VoIP is capable of sending both files and data – VoIP service allows you to send files or data, like faxes, over the connection, too. Just like you would over your broadband connection from your computer, you can send faxes anywhere faster and at a much lower cost than you would with a cell phone or a land line. VoIP allows you to send files or data much in the same way that you would if you were downloading a file from the internet.

VoIP goes with you where ever you go – Since the internet is accessible throughout the world, VoIP will always be there with you. Where ever you can establish a broadband connection you can use your VoIP service to make a call. Wireless, or WiFi, “hotspots” are available in hotels, coffee shops, airports, etc., all over the world so you will almost always have your service there with you. If you’re out on the road a lot, just think about all the money that you’ll save by not having to pay extra for long distance calls or additional cell phone service fees when you need to make a call back home. Staying in touch with the office or, if you’ve gotten rid of your old traditional service at home, too, the family will be just like being there. All you will need to do is hook up a headset and microphone to your laptop and you’ll be good to go. There are also VoIP phones, or softphones, available that are a lot like cell phones with software installed on them that will allow youto use the service much in the same way by tapping into an existing internet signal. Some VoIP service providers include these phones as part of the package you choose so that anywhere there is a broadband connection available, you can use your softphone to make calls just the same.

Hopefully this has helped to clear up any of the questions you may have had in regards to why you should get rid of your current land line or cell phone service, or both, and go with VoIP service instead, whether it be for your business or personal use. Besides, if you already have a computer with a broadband connection, a router, a microphone and/or a headset, then you’re already more than halfway there.

VoIP is the future of telecommunications and the future is now. So before you go and sign on for another year with your current cell phone provider or commit to another annual contract with your land line phone service, I highly recommend that you look into VoIP phone service instead. Not only will you begin to reap the benefits of saving money by eliminating your current service providers right off the bat, you will also realize the convenience and quality that comes with VoIP, too. By doing so now, you will show other businesses that you’re staying on the cutting edge of technology and why they should be doing business with you and not somebody else. Because if you wait too long and suddenly find yourself falling behind in the game, it could already be too late. Let’s put it this way, if another business is trying to get a hold of you and find themselves having to pay additional charges because they’re calling your traditional land line office phone, or cell phone for that matter, do you think they’re going to call back if they’ve managed to get a hold of someone else that’s not costing them additional money? Think about it.

Learn more. Visit www.CarolinaDigitalPhone.com


Hosted email gives your business a much more professional feel, which should give you a leg up with prospective clients, especially in this economic climate! To stay competitive, helpfully sophisticated messaging tools can provide a highly efficient way to not just access communications but also manage contacts and schedule tasks.

Hosted email also has the advantage of allowing you to scale up and down as needed. Pay-as-you-go models minimize your risks while maximizing your benefits! Letting information technology professionals operate your e-mail server saves you time and lets you concentrate on your business. Even if you have your own IT staff on hand, letting someone else do the grunt work frees up your own people for more important matters!

And again, it all just feels so much more professional. Hosted email means that you don’t have advertising running along your messages. It means you needn’t see any yourself when accessing your e-mail. Such premium services are mostly geared towards small to medium-sized businesses, giving you enterprise-level power at a fraction of the cost of running your own servers like the Big Boys! Instead of fiddling with configurations, you just tell your host how you want things, and because it’s professionally hosted you can be sure of expert quality second to none. Why waste time with free webmail and the like? Plans are affordable and the convenience can’t be beat.

Again, you also look better, and in business as in much else in life, first impressions are lasting impressions! Have you ever had someone hand you a fancy business card with a free webmail account listed? How did that make you feel about the person or his or her company? Not very positively, in all likelihood. Well, spare yourself some of that uncertainty in the minds of others, especially potential clients!

Less and less of today’s computing is done on desktop computers; cloud computing, in which operations are carried out on a network of shared, remote servers, is expected to rise as the demand for computing power increases. This raises some crucial questions about security: Can we, for instance, perform computations on data stored in “the cloud” without letting anyone else see our information? Research carried out at the Weizmann Institute and MIT is moving us closer to the ability to work on data while it is still encrypted, giving an encrypted result that can later be securely deciphered.

Attempting computation on sensitive data stored on shared servers leaves that data exposed in ways that traditional encryption techniques can’t protect against. The main problem is that to manipulate the data, it has to be first decoded. “Until a few years ago, no one knew if the encryption needed for this sort of online security was even possible,” says Dr. Zvika Brakerski, who recently completed his Ph.D. in the group of Prof. Shafi Goldwasser of the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department. In 2009, however, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University named Craig Gentry provided the first demonstration of so-called fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). But the original method was extraordinarily time consuming and unwieldy, making it highly impractical. Gentry constructed his FHE system by using fairly sophisticated math, based on so-called ideal lattices, and this required him to make new and unfamiliar complexity assumptions to prove security. Gentry’s use of ideal lattices seemed inherent to fully homomorphic encryption; researchers assumed that they were necessary for the server to perform such basic operations as addition and multiplication on encrypted data.

Brakerski, together with Dr. Vinod Vaikuntanathan (who was a student of Goldwasser’s at MIT), surprised the computer security world earlier this year with two recent papers in which they described several new ways of making fully homomorphic encryption more efficient. For one thing, they managed to make FHE work with much simpler arithmetic, which speeds up processing time. And a surprise discovery showed that a mathematical construct used to generate the encryption keys could be simplified without compromising security. Gentry’s original ideal lattices are theoretical collections of points that can be added together — as in an ordinary lattice structure — but also multiplied. But the new research shows that the lattice does not have to be ideal, which simplifies the construction immensely. “The fact that it worked was something like magic, and it has challenged our assumptions about the function of the ideal lattices in homomorphic encryption,” says Brakerski.

Their result promises to pave a path to applying FHE in practice. Optimized versions of the new system could be hundreds — or even thousands — of times faster than Gentry’s original construction. Indeed, Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan have managed to advance the theory behind fully homomorphic encryption to the point that computer engineers can begin to work on applications. These might include, for instance, securing medical information for research: A third party could perform large medical studies on encrypted medical records without having access to the individuals’ information.