If your business phone is still a copper line — or a dusty PBX in a closet that one retired technician somewhere still understands — you are paying landline money for a fraction of what a modern system does. This is the plain-English version of what replaces it, with real numbers, written for the small offices, shops and clinics we work with across Hamilton, Oakville, Burlington, Brantford and Norfolk County.
We should say up front: we run our own phones exactly this way. The number on our site rings a VoIP trunk into a UniFi Talk system in our own rack, and the same call can be answered at a desk or on a cell. Everything below is from doing it, not from a brochure.
What a modern phone system actually is
The phone becomes another thing on your network. Calls travel over your internet connection to a provider, who connects them to the phone network. On top of that you get the features that used to cost enterprise money: an auto-attendant that greets and routes callers, ring groups so the front desk and the office ring together, voicemail that lands in your email, business hours and holiday handling, and apps so the shop line can follow you to a job site. Your existing number moves with you — more on porting below.
There are three sensible ways for a small business to buy this.
Route 1: hosted VoIP (a hosted PBX)
The system lives with a provider; you pay per user per month and plug in desk phones or use apps. In Canada, expect roughly $20–40 per user per month depending on provider and features. For a five-person office that is $100–200 a month, everything included, and someone else worries about the servers.
Hosted is the right answer for most businesses: predictable cost, no hardware beyond the handsets, and easy scaling when you hire. The catch is that the per-seat fee never ends, and quality still depends entirely on the network in your building — a hosted seat on a congested network sounds worse than a copper line ever did.
Route 2: an on-site UniFi Talk system
If your building already runs UniFi gear (or is getting it), UniFi Talk puts the phone system in the same console as your network and cameras. You buy the desk phones once, and instead of paying per user you pay per line, not per person. As of this writing Talk's Plus plan runs about US$10 a month per line with a generous pool of North American minutes, and a Pro tier at about US$25 adds unlimited calling — call it roughly $14 or $35 CAD. Two people or ten can share that line; there are no per-seat fees.
For a five-person office with one main number and one direct line, that is the difference between roughly $150 a month hosted and $30–70 a month on Talk, after the one-time hardware. Talk is leaner on features than the big hosted platforms — no fancy call-centre analytics — but for "answer the phone, route it sensibly, take a voicemail," it is more system than most small offices ever use.
Route 3: a managed SIP trunk on your Talk system
There is a third route, and it is the one we run ourselves: keep the Talk system in your rack, but feed it with a SIP trunk from a wholesale carrier instead of Ubiquiti's plans. Wholesale rates are cents per minute, so for typical small-office call volumes the monthly line cost drops below either option above. The reason most businesses never touch this route is that someone has to set up and look after the trunk — carrier configuration, 911 registration, monitoring — which is exactly the part we take on. You get the on-site system, the lowest ongoing cost of the three, and one local company responsible for the whole thing, phones to cabling.
The part everyone skips: the network underneath
Every "VoIP sounds terrible" story we have been called into traces back to the network, not the phone service. Voice packets are tiny but impatient. Getting call quality right means PoE switching so phones power from the network jack, a voice VLAN so calls do not compete with someone's cloud backup, and QoS on the router so voice goes first when the connection is busy. This is designed in before the phones arrive — it is why we treat phones as part of the network, not an accessory to it. If your office network needs to be brought up to that standard anyway, that project and the phone project are cheaper done together.
Porting: keeping the number you have had for twenty years
Your number is portable by law in Canada, and porting is routine — but the order of operations matters. The new provider files the port; the old line keeps working until the number moves; only then do you cancel the old service. Cancel first and the number can be released back to the carrier's pool, and getting it back ranges from unpleasant to impossible. A port for a regular business line typically completes in a few business days. Plan it mid-week, keep a temporary forward in place, and nobody calling the shop ever notices.
The 911 detail every VoIP buyer should know
This one matters. A copper line tells the 911 operator where you are; a VoIP call does not inherently know. Canadian VoIP providers handle 911 through a registered service address — when you sign up, your civic address goes on file, and if you move (or take the softphone to a cottage) it is on you to update it. It works well, but it is a real difference from a landline, and any provider or installer who does not bring it up is skipping something the CRTC requires them to explain. We cover it in every deployment, along with the other analog holdouts: fax machines, elevator phones, and alarm panels that dial out — those get their own solutions rather than being wished onto VoIP.
What we would pick for a typical office
There is no single right answer, which is why we sell all three. A business that wants zero on-site anything and simple per-user billing is best on a hosted seat from a reputable Canadian provider, with us making sure the network treats it properly. An office already going UniFi usually lands on Talk — on Ubiquiti's plans, or with our managed trunk behind it when call volume makes the math obvious. All of it is described on our business phones & VoIP page, and every version starts the same way — tell us how calls flow through your business today, and we will price the routes side by side and recommend the cheapest one that actually fits.
Sources
- UniFi Talk (Ubiquiti — plans and current per-number pricing)
- CRTC: 9-1-1 services for VoIP customers (how 911 works on VoIP in Canada)
- CRTC: transferring your phone number (your right to port a number)
Cabling, networks, cameras, access control, smart homes, hosting and software for homes and small business across Southwestern Ontario. Twenty-plus years in the trade, and we still answer the phone.