The exponential growth in video conferencing through the pandemic made Zoom a household name. With an intuitive interface and cost-effective pricing, the world turned to Zoom for everything from family lockdown gatherings to official government briefings. And two years on, as the work from home phenomenon continues, organizations are looking to unify their business communications fully with their attention on calling.
Enter, Zoom Phone. Offering full PBX capabilities from the same interface customers know and love from Zoom meetings, Zoom Phone is a compelling replacement for legacy phone systems. Perfect for the hybrid workplace, with no complex or outdated hardware needed, which brings with it considerable cost benefits, Zoom phone is making it easy to take your business calling to the cloud.
But, before you can take and make phone calls in Zoom, you'll need to connect to the external Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). And depending on your business requirements, the way you connect will have different implications for the costs you incur.
Zoom Phone offers three main ways to enable external calling:
In this blog, we’ll outline the pros and cons of each option, to help you make the right choice for your business.
Zoom’s native calling plans are charged on a per-user-per month basis. The same features are included across plans and the only difference is how you’re charged. In this case, Zoom Phone acts as the PSTN carrier and connects directly to the public phone network.
With this option, Zoom assigns each user a number for inbound calls along with a bundle of minutes for external calls. There are three primary versions of this plan:
Zoom currently offers coverage to users in 40 + countries.
Pros
Cons
With the BYOC feature, businesses can keep their current voice service provider by redirecting existing voice circuits to the Zoom Phone Cloud. This process utilizes on-premises Session Border Controllers (SBCs) to connect to Zoom Phone’s cloud PBX over the public internet. Businesses can work with their SIP trunk provider of choice or use an existing SBC to plug into Zoom’s network.
Pricing with BYOC differs depending on the provider you work with, but likely will be more cost-effective than calling plans. It also offers the opportunity to shop around and compare pricing from a variety of providers. With this option, businesses can preserve any calling rates and previously negotiated contracts with existing carriers.
Pros
Cons
Phone Provider Exchange is a new option to add PSTN Calling to Zoom and is essentially the cloud-hosted version of BYOC. It allows companies to provision voice services directly from third party carries, directly through the Zoom tenant, without the need to install any on site hardware. Those carriers have been carefully vetted by Zoom and have direct links between their own networks and Zoom’s data centers through trusted cloud-peering.
Users can discover and select providers through the Marketplace App, which will allow you to connect the provider to your Zoom tenant.
In terms of costs, although the provisioning of your voice and phone services will be available through Zoom, you will be signing an agreement directly with your chosen provider. You will need to establish and agree terms with them, including your call rates, any monthly rental costs, technical support fees, and whether you will be billed based on your usage or on a bundled per-user-per-month basis.
In most cases, Phone Provider Exchange should be substantially more cost efficient than Calling Plans, because you can shop around between providers offering a variety of pricing models.
At Pure IP, for example, we offer the same transparent pricing on Zoom's Phone Provider Exchange that we offer all our customers, using a pay-for-what-you-use model that can be up to 60% more cost effective than call plan bundles.
Pros
Cons
Pure IP offers full PSTN replacement services in 43 countries and service coverage in a total of 137 countries. We were one of the first partners to be approved for the PPE program and have been involved since the early stages of its development.
Get in touch with us for an informal chat on how we can help you find the best option for Zoom Phone that suits your requirements and budget.