This one is almost always based on a number someone heard years ago — usually from a competitor’s quote for an enterprise system that was never right for the business in the first place. The actual cost of a modern on-premises system for a small business starts at $3,499 for hardware plus $699 per year in licensing. For 20 users, that works out to about $35 per user per year — less than a single cell phone case.

Cloud-hosted systems run $25 per user per month with no hardware to buy at all. SIP trunks to replace your POTS lines cost around $200 per month for a 20-user business, replacing analog line bills that are often significantly higher.

The more important question is what the current system is costing. Dropped calls, missed sales, and staff workarounds are real expenses — they just don’t appear on a phone bill.

This objection usually comes from a manager who remembers the last phone system installation — a multi-day event involving a technician with a ladder, a thick binder of dialing codes, and a staff that spent three weeks hitting the wrong buttons. That was a different era.

Modern phone systems are built around the assumption that users won’t read a manual. Transferring a call is a button tap. Voicemail plays in your email inbox like any other audio message. The mobile app looks and works like a smartphone — because your staff already has one in their pocket.

Phonewire stays on-site until every staff member is comfortable — not until the installation is technically complete, but until the people actually using the phones feel confident. Most teams are fully operational the same day the system goes live.

This one had some truth to it fifteen years ago. It has essentially none today — with one important caveat: VoIP quality is only as good as the implementation behind it. A system installed correctly by someone who understands how voice traffic behaves on a network will sound better than your old analog lines. A system thrown together by a reseller who primarily sells routers will not.

The difference is in the setup: Quality of Service (QoS) rules on the router, proper codec selection, managed SIP trunks with dedicated bandwidth, and a pre-installation network assessment that identifies problems before any phone is plugged in. Phonewire does all of this as part of standard installation. We’ve been doing it since 1998.

If you’ve had a bad VoIP experience before, the problem was almost certainly the implementation — not the technology.

This is the most expensive workaround in business communications, and it’s more common than most owners realize. When staff use personal cell phones for business calls, the business has no visibility into call activity, no ability to transfer calls to colleagues, no shared voicemail, no after-hours auto-attendant, and no professional first impression for new clients. Customers who call a cell number and get a generic voicemail greeting don’t leave a message — they call the next result on Google.

More importantly, when that employee leaves, they take their “business” number with them. Every client who has that number saved in their phone is now calling your former employee.

A modern phone system includes a mobile app — the Linkus UC client — that runs on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows. Your staff uses their own phones, but calls come from the business number, transfers work normally, and voicemail lands in a shared system. It’s everything about cell phone convenience without any of the business liability.

This is the most understandable objection — and the most dangerous one. Phone systems don’t fail with warning signs. One morning the system simply doesn’t come up, or a critical card fails, or the power supply that’s been running hot for eight years finally gives out. At that point, “if it’s not broken” has become “our phones have been down for two days.”

Emergency replacements are significantly more expensive than planned ones. An emergency deployment — no preparation time, no porting lead time, staff thrown onto a new system with no training — costs more in disruption than the system itself. And if your system is more than 8-10 years old, finding replacement parts and a technician who still knows the platform adds weeks to an already-urgent situation.

Old phone systems also have security implications. Systems still running POTS lines or legacy PBX software without updates are increasingly vulnerable to toll fraud — unauthorized international calls billed to your account that some providers hold the customer responsible for. It’s not common, but it happens, and older systems are the target.