Small businesses should not be put off VoIP solutions

Small businesses who want to use VoIP solutions should not be worried by a report which suggested the UK's relatively slow broadband speed would affect the technology, according to an expert.

The manager of the British Computing Society engineering and technology forum, Adrian Walmsley, believes that the report by the Communications Management Association (CMA) was referring more to next-generation video applications, and not VoIP solutions.

Mr Walmsley thinks that for small businesses located on one site, a single broadband connection is enough to use VoIP phones.

And even if the company is based on multiple sites, it should still not put them off.

"One of the huge benefits of VoIP for small businesses is that it allows a group of distributed workers, perhaps home-based, to appear as a fully joined-up business to their customers, with a single external telephone number," he said.

The CMA has called on the government recently to create a national broadband strategy to deal with the expected rise in demand as next generation services become more widespread in the next two years.