Cloud VoIP Phone Service
RingCentral provides reliable, high-quality VoIP phone service anywhere you have internet access.
What is VoIP?
To keep up with today's business needs, you need a modern way to handle your communication. Enter Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Also called IP telephony, you can make phone calls using an internet connection instead of a landline. VoIP turns voice packets into data packets so they can travel across the internet than from a telephone from a public switched telephone network (PSTN). With recent developments, you can rely on VoIP as most businesses' standard unified communications platform.
RingCentral VoIP (voice over internet protocol) is part of a secure, reliable cloud communications platform that eliminates the need for on-premise private branch exchange (PBX) hardware and phone service. With mobile apps, online meetings, and business SMS, it’s more than a landline phone system, it’s comprehensive hosted business communications at its best. Manage all of your business communications with your computer or mobile device from any location—there’s no additional hardware necessary, just an internet connection. Best of all, RingCentral provides simplified billing, free onboarding services, and 24/7 customer support as part of your VoIP service plan.
RingCentral is the industry-leading provider of VoIP services
Made for business
The modern VoIP system not only provides a reliable and unlimited IP telephony solution but it also includes features like caller ID, video conferencing, SMS, and even faxing to help businesses communicate better.
Easy and simple telephony setup
No complicated traditional phone installations needed. RingCentral can easily be configured based on the communication needs of your organization. Have your virtual phone service up and running in a day or less.
Mobile and flexible VoIP system
The best part about VoIP technology is that it leverages the internet by letting you make phone calls and video calls, host and join conferences, and send and receive fax and SMS from anywhere.
No telephony hardware needed
Unlike on-premise telephone systems that require expensive hardware like phone service servers, handset, analog phones, and PBX boxes, RingCentral only needs internet-connected devices like computers, laptops, and mobile devices to work. Just log in to your RingCentral account and you are ready to go.
24/7 customer support
From implementation to technical support, RingCentral stands by your business with our award-winning customer support team 24/7. This is not just for functionality problems and technical digital signal issues-your business can look to us for consultations and best-practice recommendations.
Robust phone service plans
Get the most advanced unified communications solution in the industry for your business. Your single (affordable!) RingCentral plan includes VoIP, cloud PBX, videoconferencing, and more features for your business.
Message. Video. Phone. Together.
What to Expect from RingCentral’s VoIP Solutions
No separate phone bills for different phone service functionalities
RingCentral’s VoIP solution is part of an all-inclusive cloud-based system that includes internet fax, voice, text, videoconferencing, and more. With transparent VoIP plans and pricing, you can expect no surprises on your next bill. No hidden fees or extra premium charges for additional features such as instant messaging or SMS.
VoIP telephone service working with virtual PBX
Get advanced VoIP phone service and routing capabilities through a cloud-based hosted PBX system. This way, all incoming calls are automatically routed to the right person or department, giving your business a more professional image.
Premium inbound call management features
Aside from advanced call routing capabilities, RingCentral also offers different call management features to help you communicate more effectively in real time. Customize how incoming calls are handled during and after business hours, set up a dial-by-name directory, and use a multi-level auto attendant. All this makes it easier for callers to reach your business.
Customizable user experience
End-users are also able to personalize how they receive their calls, which includes customizing call screening to identify callers, forwarding calls to multiple phone numbers simultaneously or chronologically, and setting up notifications for missed calls, SMS, voicemail, and online faxing.
Secure, reliable, and easy-to-manage virtual phone service
A secure VoIP service
RingCentral employs a comprehensive security strategy to protect its virtual phone service and its users. Aside from high-level encryption that protects VoIP phone calls, there are other measures employed including regular data center audits, multi-factor authentication and single-sign-on for account protection, and advanced account management and administration.
Hosted in multiple data centers for superior redundancy and reliability
To ensure consistent high-quality service for all users, RingCentral hosts its cloud-based phone service in multiple data centers with multiple servers in different locations across the US. In the event that onIn the event that one server or data center encounters some issues, then others can step up and take over.
With online dashboard for easy VoIP phone service access and management from anywhere
Access and manage RingCentral through an online dashboard on your computer or mobile phones. From there, you can add and delete business phone numbers and virtual extensions, grant admin and user roles and permissions, and even check call logs to get insights on how your company is using the system. No need to hire specialized manpower to manage your VoIP phone system.
VoIP Phones, Devices, and Equipment
Maximize VoIP services with top-of-the-line IP desk phones
To make the most out of your VoIP telephone services, RingCentral offers high-quality desktop VoIP phones that utilize standard Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and integrate seamlessly with your cloud communications solutions. Choose from different IP phone models from trusted brands like Cisco and Polycom. No complicated setup, just PLUG AND RING®.
Use analog phones to make VoIP calls
If you want to use your existing traditional telephone to make internet calls, you can do that as well. You just need an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA), which digitizes analog voice data into data packets so that it can be transmitted over the Internet.
No IP desk phones? Use your PC or MAC as a softphone
Turn your PC or MAC into your own phone. Download the RingCentral Desktop App to make and receive VoIP calls from your personal computer or laptop. In addition, you can also send a virtual fax or SMS and even start or join an audio or video conference.
Make and receive calls using your iPhone or Android Phone
Don’t be tied to your desk. Enjoy your freedom and take your phone service with you anywhere you go. As usual, you can make long-distance and international calls. You can also access RingCentral through your iPhone or Android mobile phone with a unified mobile app and stay connected to your growing business wherever you are.
RingCentral MVP™* plans for your small business PAY ANNUALLY AND SAVE UP TO 33%
Benefits of a VoIP service
As the leading business VoIP provider, mobility is at the heart of RingCentral’s VoIP solution. RingCentral’s VoIP technology is mobile-ready and is ideal for bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives. RingCentral for iPhone® and Android™ makes and receives VoIP phone calls and can switch networks seamlessly without dropping calls. With the mobile app, employees are empowered to work the way they want on their favorite device—all while maintaining a unified business identity.
For IT administrators and small-business owners alike, a centralized dashboard makes management easy and efficient. The entire VoIP phone system, including all extensions and company locations, can be managed from anywhere, on any device. Whether your workforce is distributed across business locations, working remotely, and even using a home phone, keep them connected as if they never left the office. The full-featured app boosts productivity and provides employees with voice, fax, text, conferencing, and online meetings—anywhere there’s an internet connection. View all the benefits of a cloud VoIP system here.
You can expect all-inclusive pricing and one consolidated bill from RingCentral—eliminating complex management and billing associated with multiple vendors.
RingCentral’s VoIP hosting service is part of an all-inclusive service, which means you get voice, fax, text, audio conferencing, online meetings—plus mobile and desktop apps in one plan. With transparent plans and pricing, you know exactly what you are paying for—there are no hidden fees or charges beneath the surface. In addition to offering a robust feature set, RingCentral provides unlimited long-distance calling in the US and Canada, and toll-free minutes are included in all RingCentral MVP plans.
Traditional on-premise PBX systems have hidden costs that are difficult to estimate upfront. Besides the obvious price tags on traditional phone system’s PBX hardware, software licensing, and new telephones, these are a few hidden PBX costs to consider:
- Telephone service maintenance contracts
- PBX replacement and upgrade parts
- Cost of connecting multiple locations
- Telecom charges for local, long-distance, international calling,* or toll-free calls
- Added costs for standalone services, such as online faxing, adding telephone numbers, or audio conferencing
Learn more about calculating the real cost of a business phone system and how cloud VoIP services compare with other types of telephony.
From the moment you become a RingCentral customer, you are fully supported by a team of product and customer success experts who deeply understand how to service VoIP, and can help keep your entire business phone system running smoothly. In addition to providing 24/7 customer support, RingCentral ensures customer success with free, comprehensive onboarding.
The onboarding process provides new customers with network readiness information, phone number transfer instructions, guided implementation, and training sessions. You will have a dedicated account manager to deliver product expertise and recommendations so your RingCentral VoIP phone system evolves with your company’s needs and the latest innovative solutions businesses require to stay at the forefront of communications.
RingCentral actively seeks customer involvement in product feedback and development. Learn more about the latest VoIP phone features by participating in customer beta programs. Plus, release notes, webinars, and other useful product resources are available to RingCentral customers as soon as features are released, so you can stay up to date with the latest VoIP technology innovations.
*International calling rate may apply.
VoIP phone service for business
Traditional phone services
- Pay thousands of dollars for on-site traditional phone system hardware
- No free calls-long distance and international calls are costly and paid per minute
- Business features come with extra cost
- Requires additional physical cable lines for traditional landline expansion
- Can remain active during outages
VoIP
- No expensive hardware required, so you save money up front
- Free VoIP calls-long distance calls, if not entirely free, only require nominal fees
- Comes with standard business phone features like call monitoring call forwarding, voicemail, and others
- Add-on extensions require a few clicks or taps on admin control panel
- Needs the internet to deliver service
The popularity of VoIP across all kinds of businesses has driven many VoIP service providers offering this technology to lower their costs in order to attract more clients. As such, it’s easy to fall for a VoIP provider that offers the cheapest solutions.
You as the consumer shouldn’t be looking at the initial price alone but at the total cost of ownership, which is the sum of acquiring, deploying, and operating a VoIP phone system over its entire life cycle. Be sure to look at the upfront, deployment, operational, and upgrade costs.
- Upfront costs
Comprehensive, high-quality systems naturally come with higher upfront costs, but they are more reliable and easier to maintain—and still offer 30% cost savings over legacy phone solutions. Outside of the VoIP service pricing package, you should also take into account the cost of headsets, webcams, and a strong network connection to ensure call quality. - Deployment costs
Get a service provider to design, implement, and configure your cloud-based VoIP system. Then you’ll need to hire experts to teach your employees how to use the system properly and effectively. A more experienced, knowledgeable provider can have all these covered for you. - Operational costs
Think of the monthly recurring phone service costs, which may be dependent on the plan you choose. For instance, there are companies that offer long-distance calls per minute and there are others that provide unlimited calls for a fixed monthly fee. If you are managing your VoIP phone system on your own, you also have to consider the power, cooling, and maintenance costs on a monthly basis. - Upgrade costs
Be sure to set aside some budget for when you need to make any upgrades. Then again, if you chose a hosted VoIP provider, you don’t have to worry about anything.
Compared to the traditional phone, with VoIP, you can make phone calls through the internet. This means that instead of a desk phone or a landline, you can make calls through your mobile phones, tablets, and even your desktop, as long it's hooked to an internet connection.
Through VoIP technology, your voice converts into digital packets so it can travel through the internet across various networks and vice versa, so participants in the call get to have a conversation.
This technology enlists the help of several protocols or rules which help in routing data, such as:
- Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to help conversations happen in real time,
- Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) which carries each digital voice data packet in real-time, and
- Transmission Control Protocol & User Datagram Protocol (UDP) are responsible for the accuracy and speed of digital signal and data exchange.
On the business aspect, VoIP allows businesses to grow exponentially. Because you are not tied to a landline, you can connect to any mobile device the company wishes them to have. You can also strengthen your relations with your customers, partners, and your team through collaborative VoIP solutions such as audio and videoconferencing, among others.
You can also leverage and modernize your business phone systems with VoIP as the core of your telephony. With a VoIP service, you can easily handle incoming calls and create outbound calls performed by cloud-based servers that perform these call routing functionalities. Thus, a VoIP phone system is beneficial for every business, may it be enterprise, middle-sized, or small businesses alike.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is the way to go for businesses
If your business has multiple locations, you need just as many hardware units and phone lines to ensure a certain level of service mobility. This is not a problem with VoIP, which allows you to make outbound calls and receive incoming calls from any device. It practically follows you wherever you go.
As long as there is an internet connection, the sales manager can contact field staff for an urgent task and a customer service rep working from home can easily address a complaint to avoid the customer’s ire. If you have to transfer a call to a colleague who’s working remotely, you don’t need to ask customers to call a different number.
So you’ve opened up a new location and need more phones for your employees. But how many will you actually use over the next year? You better estimate carefully so you don’t spend precious money on phone lines that’ll end up untouched.
There is definitely more to VoIP than just making or receiving calls. Apart from the basic features you get from traditional systems, modern VoIP systems can incorporate a host of other helpful communications tools, such as instant messaging, teleconferencing and video conferencing, virtual faxing, call recording, and more.
And yes, VoIP is capable of supporting fax through virtual faxing. It allows you to send and receive faxes without purchasing an actual machine and, by extension, paper and toner. All fax messages, as well as voicemails, can be forwarded to and stored in a single location.
Gather your employees anytime using the video conferencing feature if you have to discuss important issues. You may also use real-time team messaging if you have to simultaneously work on a task and get things done fast. All these work no matter where your employees are and whatever device they are using.
The above mentioned features are just some of the things that make VoIP such an efficiency booster for businesses of any type and size. Having access to advanced productivity tools allows workflows to be streamlined and empowers employees to multitask as the need arises.
Let’s say one of your sales agents is on a call within a queue. While waiting, he or she can browse through voicemail-to-text transcriptions from their email inbox or maybe archive or forward fax with the click of a mouse. You’ll be surprised to see the numerous features and a brand-new world of possibilities with a sophisticated VoIP phone service.
Integrating traditional phone systems with other systems your business uses is no easy task. In fact, it is incredibly difficult—as any company that’s experienced it could attest. With VoIP, this issue is nonexistent.
One of the things that make the adoption of VoIP technology appealing is the fact that it is capable of integrating with many business systems you and your employees are already familiar with, especially when you have phones that work with VoIP. As such, onboarding would be a cinch. This is possible because VoIP calls harness the power of the internet. For instance, an integration with Outlook® allows you to send and receive a fax or make outbound calls through that program.
Integrating business analytics is also relatively simple with VoIP. With actionable insights at your disposal, your business will be able to monitor and improve processes to further enhance your overall efficiency, connectivity, and productivity.
What if the internet in your area stops working? This is a common apprehension among business owners and managers who are considering switching to VoIP. They think that if the internet connection stops working, there is no way to make a voice call. Let's not even get started on traditional phones, which use cables and other hardware that can be compromised by fire or destroyed by an earthquake.
When disaster strikes or power goes out, your employees will have a hard time communicating with each other and customers won't be able to reach them. If you fail to recover quickly, you'll suffer a huge loss in terms of production and customer confidence and deal with regulatory fines.
Healthcare facilities, for example, need to abide by the provisions included in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Otherwise, they could lose a huge amount of money on sanctions and penalties.
This is not a problem with a hosted VoIP phone system, which sits at a protected data center. It is monitored around the clock. So if something happens in your place of business, incoming calls will be forwarded to another location.
VoIP’s advanced call-forwarding functionality gives you the capacity to choose where and how your voice calls are forwarded so you don’t have to lose productivity in case of a disaster or a power outage. So even if it’s impossible to answer your office desk phone, you still have a secondary phone service like your laptop or smartphone you can use to communicate with collaborators and customers.
Frequently asked questions (FAQ) about VoIP services
A typical hosted VoIP phone system generally costs between $20 and $45 per user. Of course, it will depend on the VoIP phone system features, capabilities, and the VoIP provider itself. You can check the RingCentral plans and pricing section above to see which plan fits your business needs. Whether you are a small business, a mid-sized business, or a big enterprise, you will find that RingCentral can seamlessly fit into how your organization operates. Plus, more than just a VoIP service that allows for unlimited calling across North America (US and CA), RingCentral offers an industry-leading unified communications solution that not only gives you a calling plan, but also provides you with a central hub for both communications and collaboration.
If you have employees that work away from the business’ home base, the top VoIP phone service for them would be the one that allows them to feel connected to the company even if they are not physically in the office. With the RingCentral App, telecommuting employees no longer have to use their home phones for work. Also, it provides your workforce with a central communications hub where team collaboration is encouraged through its various functionalities such as voice, fax, text messaging, live chat, and online meetings.
Any business can technically implement their own VoIP phone solution with the right combination of IT infrastructure to support VoIP technology and the skills and knowledge to make it happen. Unfortunately, the amount of capital investment needed to do that is staggering. Cloud communication service providers like RingCentral are able to offer businesses VoIP services with advanced features like cloud PBX, automated-attendant, answering rules, call forwarding, hold music, caller ID, call blocking, and more with flexible plans and pricing by hosting the services on their own secure, multi-tiered, and redundant cloud IT infrastructure and leveraging the internet for delivery of service.
There are direct-to-consumer VoIP services that do not require payment. WhatsApp, Viber, and even Facebook Messenger are basic mobile VoIP apps that facilitate calls over the Internet. These apps, however, are more for personal use and not suited for business communications. If you want to project a professional image, a VoIP phone system is the way to go, especially with its advanced features that are designed to help organizations communicate better with their customer base. It is not free, but RingCentral’s flexible VoIP plans and pricing will allow your business to have one bill to cover your communications needs with predictable fees and no surprise costs.
Most contact centers and call centers leverage VoIP technology as their telephony component because of its more affordable price when compared to traditional carriers. Aside from facilitating calls over the internet, VoIP is also used as the audio component for most video conference calling solutions. While there are other technologies at work for video calls and video conferencing, VoIP is usually the one responsible for allowing participants to actually talk with each other.
VoIP has paved the way for other means of leveraging the internet to send digital files over IP telephony transmissions. Virtual fax is one of those. While VoIP itself is not used to send fax over the internet, the concepts are pretty similar. The main difference is that the transmission is one way and the payload is a soft or hard copy of documents. The same goes for other modern systems that use IP transmissions like home security systems. Similar to virtual fax and VoIP, home security cameras use IP transmission to remotely transmit footage to cellphones and other streaming devices. The possibilities are virtually endless.
More resources about VoIP and Internet Phone services
What is VoIP and how it works
How virtual phone call works
VoIP Phone system
Internet phone service
VoIP Network
Virtual phone service
VoIP Provider
Small business phone service
VoIP Caller
More Security features
Single Sign-on
Data center overview
Roles and permissions
*RingCentral Office is now RingCentral MVP. All references to "RingCentral Office," whether in terms of service, advertising or product descriptions, mean "RingCentral MVP".