Ask an office manager in Anchorage what next month’s phone bill will be and you’ll often get a shrug. The number moves. A repair visit here, an extra charge there, a line item nobody remembers agreeing to. For a small business trying to plan a year ahead, that uncertainty is a cost of its own.
A hosted phone system changes how you pay for phones. Instead of a pile of separate charges, you pay one monthly price per user for hosting. Here’s where the surprises come from today, and how the simpler model works.
Where phone costs actually come from
Most offices don’t have one phone cost. They have several, spread across different bills and different years:
- The equipment in the closet. An older on-site phone system was bought years ago, and it keeps costing money in maintenance agreements, replacement parts and service calls.
- Per-location charges. Every office, shop or branch often has its own account and its own monthly bill, even when they all belong to the same business.
- Usage and add-on charges. Some bills charge by the minute for certain calls, or charge extra for things like voicemail or call forwarding.
- Moves, adds and changes. Hiring someone, moving a desk or opening a new room can mean a technician visit and a work order.
- The big failure. When an aging system finally dies, the replacement is rarely in the budget.
None of these are unusual. The trouble is that they don’t arrive on a schedule. You find out about them when the invoice shows up.
How hosting simplifies the bill
With a hosted phone system, the phone system itself doesn’t live in your building. It runs as software on servers in a data center, and your phones connect to it over the Internet. IBeXc is hosted in a secure Anchorage data center on Tier 1 Internet: the backbone networks the Internet itself runs on.
Because the heavy lifting happens in the data center, what you pay for is hosting: the computing, bandwidth and power that run your system. It’s billed per user per month. Ten people on the system means ten users on the bill, and the number is the same in March as it is in August unless you decide to change it.
That one price covers a lot of what used to be separate. Everyday features like voicemail to email, call queues and phone menus are part of the hosted system. Your quote shows exactly what’s included, so nothing shows up later that you didn’t expect.
No more surprise repair bills
An on-site phone system is a piece of hardware you own. When it breaks, you pay to fix it. With a hosted system, the equipment that does the real work is ours to look after. We design and write the phone system software ourselves, and we’ve run it on our own equipment since 2002. Updates and upkeep happen on our side, not in your back room.
Your desk phones are Snom phones that come as part of the IBeXc service. They plug into your office network. If one has a problem, it’s one phone, not the whole office going quiet.
That difference matters more than it sounds. As we explain in the hidden costs of an aging phone system, older systems tend to fail all at once, and an emergency replacement is the most expensive kind.
Changes without change orders
Adding a person is a change we make in the hosted system. There’s no new hardware in a closet and no technician appointment to wait for. Moving someone to a different desk usually means unplugging a phone and plugging it back in somewhere else.
Because there are no long-term contracts, you’re not locked into a user count you picked two years ago. If your team grows, the bill grows with it. If it shrinks, so does the bill. You always know why the number is what it is.
One bill for every location
For businesses with more than one office, predictability often turns into real savings. Instead of separate service in each town, every location can run on one combined hosted system.
One Anchorage business with two offices in Anchorage, plus offices in Wasilla, Fairbanks and Eagle River, cut its monthly phone costs sharply by moving to one combined system, and traded a stack of bills for one. Every office is different, so the best way to know is to compare your own bill.
What a predictable phone budget looks like
- A per-user monthly hosting price you can plan around.
- Features built into the system, with any add-ons spelled out in your quote.
- No surprise equipment failures in your building.
- New users added quickly, without new hardware.
- No long-term contract holding you to yesterday’s headcount.
See your own numbers
The easiest way to know what you’d pay is to compare it with what you pay now. Our quote form lets you upload a recent phone bill, and we’ll lay the two side by side. If you’d rather talk it through first, call us at 907-257-2600 and you’ll reach real people here in Anchorage. You can also read more about how our hosted phone system works, or start with our overview of why Anchorage businesses are moving to hosted phone systems.
Weighing a new on-site system against hosting? Our five-year comparison walks through it. When you’re ready to see real numbers for your office, Get a quote for your office →
