More businesses than ever now take advantage of Voice over IP (VoIP), a method of routing voice calls over networks and the Internet, which has become the de-facto standard for businesses of all sizes. Its ability to offer an increased feature set at a reduced price over traditional voice service, like an on-site PBX, is something traditional phone providers can't touch. In this month's Business Choice Awards, we once again had readers evaluate the best VoIP solutions for business to help you make the critical decision of which service or system to use.

The major attraction of VoIP remains its low cost compared to traditional phone services. This is particularly true if you use a hosted VoIP service, where you'll need to purchase minimal hardware (if any). Provided that you have adequate bandwidth, VoIP scales easier than a traditional phone connection as you can simply plug in another handset rather than ask the phone company to run a new wire. VoIP will save you money on long distance, and depending on the service, calls between your employees can be free. It's also easier to integrate VoIP calls with business applications like CRM.

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For more than 25 years, we have been augmenting our hands-on, labs-based product reviewswith our Readers' Choice Awards, in which PCMag readers rate the products and services they use the most. The Business Choice Awards extend the Readers' Choice Awards by garnering feedback about the hardware, software, and services our readers deploy, administer, maintain, and use in a business environment, from SOHO to SMB on up.

This survey asked respondents to rate their overall satisfaction with the VoIP solution they use or manage and the likelihood that they would recommend them to others. In addition, we inquired about their satisfaction with technical support and the overall reliability of the solution.

If you select, deploy, or administer the products in our Business Choice Awards, or if you advise or manage people in these roles, then you know how critical it is to choose the right products. The results of the PCMag Business Choice Awards survey are invaluable when doing so. And on the next page we'll reveal the best VoIP solution for your business.