Central Business Telephone Number

Layer 2 Communications provides hosted VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) - SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) phone systems (PBX) for your business. For Houston Area clients who require T1 (DS1) we can bundle the package with the Hosted Virtual PBX Origination Termination service, or use your existing cable or T1 internet connection.
With Layer 2 Communications Hosted VoIP - SIP Phone System PBX, you can present a unified company image under one central telephone number. All of your employees—whether in a central office, branch offices, home offices, or traveling—are reachable through your main number.
Also, incoming calls can “follow” an employee, so there is no need to put a list of contact numbers on business cards. Just one number can get to all of your phones or even follow you to hotel rooms as you travel.

Most small businesses buy at least three different phone switches over their first five years in business, in order to keep up with their changing needs. The expenses to install, maintain, and even learn all this different equipment can be enormous. You'll never have to take this route with Layer 2 Communications hosted virtual PBX, because we can scale our PBX service to meet your needs as you grow.

Some companies, believing they will eventually need more capability than a small PBX system can offer, over-buy and over-pay early on. With Layer 2 Communications hosted virtual PBX, you pay as you grow.

While having a single incoming business number gives your business a unified presence, sometimes it can be very useful to have multiple incoming business numbers. The Layer 2 Communications hosted virtual PBX solution allows an unlimited number of incoming numbers.
Multiple numbers can be used in many ways. Suppose, for example, you want to use one group of human resources to answer phone calls for several different business identities. Layer 2 Communications hosted virtual PBX can answer calls with different greetings on each incoming line and then route the calls to the shared employees. A preview announcement indicates which business identity was called, so the employee can answer correctly.
Another popular use for multiple numbers is to track response to marketing campaigns. Each advertisement or other marketing activity can include a different telephone number for prospects to get more information. Tracking the incoming activity on each phone number gives a real-time indication of which marketing activity is generating the most calls.

Many companies find that they need to add more phone lines to keep their system from ringing busy when call traffic is high. Calls placed to your business through Layer 2 Communications hosted virtual PBX are answered by our phone system, and routed to the end user(s). With each number/DID Layer 2 Communications provides 60 continuous talk paths. If you need more than 60 talk paths, Layer 2 Communications can easily add additional numbers and enable hunting. For service you only need to pay for one extension for each employee and it can be a land-line phone, a wireless phone, or a home phone for telecommuters. If all of your employees are already taking calls, we can place new calls into an ACD (automatic call distribution) queue to wait for the next available employee. While your customers are in queue, play messages – product news - promotions – or music. Your customers never need to hear a busy signal again!

Phone system downtime costs you money and productivity. If your PBX can't route calls to you, your clients can't get through to place orders or request support. Sometimes you'll just lose an order, but sometimes you'll lose customers permanently. Many cheap phone systems (both hardware and hosted) are built with little or no plan for fault tolerance. If any component of the system fails, you're out of business. Customers get busy signals or dead lines when they try to contact you. Layer 2 Communications hosted virtual PBX system incorporates clustering and load balancing with multiple site (Houston TX, and Los Angeles, CA) redundancy and automatic failover throughout the system to assure minimum downtime. When we have a component failure, that part of the system is automatically isolated and removed from use, and all calls are instantly rolled over to working equipment through Cisco networking hardware, Dell and HP Enterprise High Availability server solutions. Layer 2 Communications has also Carrier Service with XO Communications, one of the largest communications and Internet backbones in the world. Working together building strong relationships with Level 3, XO Communications, Cisco, Dell and Redhat allows Layer 2 Communications to 99.98% network availability, an average latency of 40 milliseconds or less in all regions (25ms in North America, 15ms in Europe), and less than .05% packet loss.

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