If you look after an aging on-premise PBX, you already know the routine: hardware that costs more to keep alive every year, specialist technicians who arrive on someone else's schedule, and a system that struggles to support people working from home or on the road. Hosted VoIP looks like the obvious fix. Before you commit, though, you need a clear picture of the cloud VoIP network requirements and what the change will mean for your infrastructure and your IT team.
This RingCentral white paper is written for IT managers and the business leaders they work with. It explains what happens to your network when the phone system moves to the cloud, what you need in place beforehand, and who becomes responsible for keeping it all running.
What a cloud phone system changes for your network and IT team
Most organisations already run CRM, ERP and other software in the cloud. Voice feels different, because IT teams want firm assurances about uptime, call quality, control and maintenance. The paper starts from those concerns and answers four questions customers commonly ask. They cover reliability when the equipment sits outside your building, voice quality when colleagues are streaming or on video calls, what happens if a site loses its connection, and what "hosted" actually includes.
From there, it compares three setups: a traditional PBX, an on-premise IP PBX and a cloud phone system. A detailed diagram shows who owns the hardware and software in each model, how multiple offices connect, and where remote and mobile workers fit. If you are weighing IP PBX vs cloud, this view makes the trade-offs easy to explain to colleagues who don't live in telephony.
Building the business case for PBX replacement
You'll also get a clear account of what a cloud model does for your infrastructure, your IT resources and the wider business. The paper looks at:
- the hardware, licensing and maintenance costs that disappear along with the PBX
- how phone lines to the telco and between sites change, especially for multi-location businesses
- who takes on upgrades, repairs and security updates, and how much control IT keeps
- how adding, moving and changing users works when staffing grows or shifts
Together, these give you the arguments and the vocabulary to make an internal case for retiring a legacy system.
Checking your cloud VoIP network requirements before day one
Readiness is where many phone system projects stumble, and it gets careful attention here. The paper explains why most businesses large enough to need a PBX are in a better starting position than they might expect. It then shows how latency, jitter and packet loss affect what callers hear.
Next comes the practical part. You'll see how to estimate VoIP bandwidth requirements for your expected call volume (and why the first number you calculate is rarely enough). You'll learn when a QoS router makes sense, what kind of Internet connection to aim for, and what to look for in the data centres behind the service.
VoIP reliability is covered from a disaster recovery angle too. The paper describes what happens to incoming calls if one of your locations goes offline, and how a cloud architecture compares with an on-premise system when something goes wrong at a site.
A short appendix defines the terms that come up in any phone system discussion, from PRI and MPLS to SSAE 16 and ISO/IEC 27001. That makes the paper easy to share with finance or leadership colleagues who need the context without the jargon.
Download the RingCentral white paper on hosted VoIP readiness
Get the full white paper for the bandwidth estimation method, the router and connection recommendations, the side-by-side architecture comparison and RingCentral's answers to the questions IT teams raise most often. It's a short, practical read that helps you plan your move to a cloud phone system with fewer surprises along the way.