The phone system on the wall of most Scottish offices is a museum piece with a deadline. The UK’s analogue phone network is in its final phase of withdrawal, with remaining traditional lines switched off by the end of January 2027, and every business still running desk phones through a beige box in the comms cupboard will move to something internet-based. Mostly, that something is cloud telephony.
If the term has reached you via a salesperson, a renewal letter or a colleague, here is the plain explanation: what cloud telephony is, how calls actually work, what happens to the phone number your customers have known for twenty years, and what it should cost.
The definition
Cloud telephony (also sold as hosted VoIP, cloud PBX or hosted phone systems) means your business phone system runs as software in a provider’s data centre instead of as hardware on your premises. Calls travel over your internet connection; the “system” (numbers, extensions, call routing, voicemail, hold music, the receptionist view) is a service you log into, like any other cloud application.
The practical consequence: a phone number stops being a wire into a building and becomes an account that rings whatever you point it at: a desk handset, a computer headset, an app on someone’s mobile, or all three in order. That untethering is the feature everything else hangs off.
How a call actually works
When a customer dials your number, the call arrives at your provider’s platform, which applies your rules: ring the sales group, play the out-of-hours message, queue with an announcement, divert to a mobile after 20 seconds. The platform then delivers the call over the internet to wherever your people are: an office handset (a normal-looking desk phone that plugs into the network rather than a phone socket), a softphone app on a laptop, or the mobile app. Outbound works in reverse, with your business number presented regardless of which device made the call.
Because the intelligence lives in the platform rather than the building, the classic failure modes invert: an office power cut or flood no longer takes your phones down, because calls simply route to mobiles and home workers. The dependency that replaces it is your internet connection, which is why the requirements section below matters.
What happens to your existing numbers
They come with you. Number porting (transferring your existing numbers to the new provider) is a regulated, routine process: your 01382, 0131 or 0800 numbers move to the cloud platform and behave as before from the caller’s side. Two practical notes: porting takes a few weeks and is scheduled so there is no gap in service, and number ownership matters here exactly as it does with IT: numbers should be registered to your business, not trapped in a provider’s name, a point covered in the ownership questions from our choosing-a-provider guide.
What it needs from your infrastructure
Cloud telephony’s quality is your network’s quality, which is where an IT-led setup beats a telecoms-brochure one:
- Bandwidth: modest per call (roughly 0.1 Mbps per concurrent call), so almost any business connection has the headroom on paper.
- Stability over speed: calls suffer from jitter and packet loss, not slow downloads. A stable connection with sensible router settings beats a fast but congested one.
- Prioritisation (QoS): on busy networks, voice traffic should be prioritised over bulk downloads so a large file transfer never crackles a customer call. This is router and switch configuration, and it is the difference between “VoIP is great” and “VoIP was terrible so we went back”.
- A failover route: if the office internet dies, calls should divert automatically to mobiles. Configured in advance, an outage becomes invisible to callers; our business broadband and connectivity service pairs the phone system with the line it depends on.
What it costs and what you get
UK cloud telephony runs roughly £5 to £20 per user per month depending on features and call bundles, plus handsets if you want physical phones (many businesses now mix: handsets for reception, headsets and apps for everyone else). For that you inherit features that used to require serious PBX money: call routing and queues, auto-attendant menus, voicemail-to-email, call recording (with compliance settings; see our note in the cloud telephony service page), hunt groups, and usage reporting.
One decision point worth flagging early: businesses already living in Microsoft Teams can add calling to it instead of running a separate platform. Whether Teams Phone or a dedicated VoIP system fits better depends on how your business handles calls; our Teams Phone vs VoIP comparison takes that question properly.
Frequently asked questions
Is cloud telephony the same as VoIP?
VoIP is the transport technology (voice over the internet); cloud telephony is the full phone system delivered as a hosted service using VoIP. In sales conversations the terms are used interchangeably, and “hosted VoIP” means the same thing.
Can we keep our phone numbers?
Yes: porting existing numbers, including geographic ones like 01382, is standard and regulated, with the switch scheduled to avoid downtime. Confirm the numbers end up registered to your business.
What happens to cloud phones if the internet goes down?
Configured properly, calls fail over automatically to mobiles or another site, and callers notice nothing. Unconfigured, they hit voicemail; failover design is part of a competent setup, not an extra.
Do we need special phones?
No. Options are IP desk handsets, headsets with a desktop app, or the mobile app, in any mix. Some existing handsets can be reused; most businesses refresh them at migration since IP handsets are inexpensive.
What does cloud telephony cost for a small business?
Typically £5 to £20 per user per month plus optional handsets, with call bundles included at most tiers. A ten-person business usually lands between £80 and £180 a month all-in, replacing line rental, the old maintenance contract and the PBX’s eventual replacement cost.
Do we have to switch before the analogue switch-off?
If your lines are still analogue, yes: remaining traditional lines are withdrawn by the end of January 2027, and providers are migrating customers ahead of that. Moving on your own schedule beats moving on a deadline; our VoIP vs landline comparison covers the transition.
Get the phone system and the network from one place
Half of every bad VoIP story is a network nobody prepared. We set up cloud telephony as an IT project: connectivity assessed, QoS configured, failover designed, numbers ported without drama, because we already manage the infrastructure it runs on. Start with the free IT health check and we will tell you whether your current connection is call-ready and what the migration would look like. Get in touch before the switch-off letter arrives.
