Plenty of tradies and small shopfronts are still paying every month for a landline that mostly rings with scam calls. Fair enough to ask why. The honest answer is that for a lot of small Australian businesses, the traditional desk phone has quietly become dead weight, and business phone systems have moved almost entirely onto the internet and onto phones already in people’s pockets. The harder question is which replacement actually suits a particular business, because “VoIP” and “just use an app” get thrown around as if they’re the same decision. They’re not.
What VoIP actually is, in plain terms
VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, which is a fancy way of saying your phone calls travel as data over the internet instead of through the old copper telephone network. That old network is largely gone anyway: Telstra and Optus switched off their 3G networks in late 2024, and the NBN has been replacing copper with fibre, fixed wireless or satellite for most of a decade. A VoIP service gives you a proper business number, usually with an 02, 03, 07 or 08 area code or a 1300 number, that can ring a physical desk handset, a softphone app on a laptop, a mobile app, or several of those at once.
The appeal is obvious once you’ve used one. Calls can route to whoever’s rostered on, after-hours messages can go straight to email or a shared inbox, and you’re not tied to a single physical location the way a copper line locks you to an address. For a business with more than two or three people answering phones, or one that wants call recording, queues or an auto-attendant (“press 1 for sales”), VoIP is still the more capable option. It is, in effect, the old PABX office switchboard rebuilt as software, which is a decent illustration of how often “new” telecommunications tech just moves an old idea onto newer plumbing.
Our take: VoIP earns its keep once you’ve got a team, not a solo operator.
Why a mobile app with a second number might be enough
For a one-person or two-person business, a lot of what VoIP offers is overkill. Several providers now sell a standalone business number that lives inside an app on your existing phone, separate from your personal mobile number, with its own voicemail, business hours and caller ID. No hardware, no router configuration, nothing to install beyond an app store download. You answer from the same phone you already carry, but callers see your business identity and you can switch the app’s “do not disturb” on after 5pm without touching your personal number at all.
We reckon this gets undersold by comparison sites that assume every small business wants a proper office phone system. A sole trader doing quotes from a ute doesn’t need call queues. They need one reliable number that doesn’t ring at 9pm on a Sunday, and an app does that for a fraction of the cost and none of the setup headache.
The trade-off is flexibility at scale. Most app-based numbers don’t handle more than a handful of simultaneous lines well, and features like call recording for compliance or detailed call analytics tend to be thinner or absent. If the business is still just “you”, that’s rarely a real loss.
The hybrid setup most growing businesses land on
In our experience, the businesses that get this right don’t pick one camp and stay there forever. They start with an app-based number, and when a second or third person starts answering calls, they move the number across to a proper VoIP provider that still delivers to mobile apps, just with the backend smarts of call routing and shared visibility added on. The number itself is portable in almost all cases, so this isn’t a case of starting again from scratch, which is worth checking with any provider before signing up.
A café on Smith Street in Fitzroy ordering stock and taking bookings has completely different needs to a six-person electrical contracting business juggling emergency callouts, and the right system genuinely changes as headcount grows. The mistake we see most often is businesses buying VoIP capability they’ll never use because a salesperson convinced them it was the “proper” way to do it.
What this actually costs, roughly
Pricing varies a lot by provider and by how many users and features are bundled in, so treat any numbers here as a rough guide rather than a quote. App-based business numbers for sole traders tend to sit somewhere around $15 to $40 a month at the time of writing, often with no lock-in contract. VoIP systems with multiple extensions, call queues and an auto-attendant typically start higher, often somewhere in the $30 to $70 per user per month range once you add features, though some providers price per site rather than per seat.
The real cost trap isn’t the headline monthly fee, it’s contract length. Some VoIP providers still push 24 or 36-month agreements with early termination fees that make switching painful if the service turns out to be unreliable or the business’s needs change. We’d push back hard on any multi-year lock-in for a small business, because the market moves fast enough that what’s competitive today may not be in two years. A month-to-month or 12-month term costs a little more per month but buys real flexibility, and for most small operators that’s worth paying for.
The thing nobody mentions: your internet has to hold up
This is the part that catches people out. A VoIP phone system is only as reliable as the internet connection carrying it, and if your NBN connection drops out during a storm, so does your phone line, full stop. That’s a genuine step backward from the old copper network, which kept working during power outages because it carried its own power down the line. Anyone running a business that can’t afford to miss calls, a medical clinic, a tradie dispatch line, an emergency locksmith, needs to think about what happens when the internet goes down, not just what happens when it works.
The practical fixes are modest: a 4G or 5G backup connection that kicks in automatically, call forwarding to a mobile number as a fallback, or at minimum a plan for how calls get answered manually if the system is offline for a day. The ACCC’s guidance on internet and phone services is a reasonable starting point for understanding what providers are obliged to tell you about service reliability before you sign up. We’ve written separately about which internet option actually suits Australian conditions, and the reliability differences between connection types matter more for a business phone system than they do for streaming Netflix.
Verdict: if your business genuinely cannot miss a call, budget for backup connectivity, not just a backup phone plan.
Security, privacy and the stuff that actually bites later
VoIP systems are internet-connected devices and inherit the same risks as any other internet-connected device: weak default passwords, unpatched firmware, and phishing attempts aimed at staff who answer the phone all day and are primed to trust callers. The Australian Cyber Security Centre’s small business guidance is worth a read before signing up with any provider, and it’s the kind of advice that sounds boring right up until someone’s business number gets hijacked for toll fraud, which does happen and can run up genuinely large bills overnight.
There’s also a data question that gets skipped in the sales pitch. Call recordings and voicemail transcripts are personal information under Australia’s privacy framework, and if your business is covered by the Privacy Act, you need a reasonable basis for storing them and a way to delete them on request. Most providers will have a page addressing where recordings are stored and for how long, which is worth checking before you assume it’s “just a phone call”.
Scam calls aimed at businesses are also a live issue, particularly ones impersonating the ATO, the business’s own bank, or even the phone provider itself asking to “verify” account details. We’ve covered the newer tactics in detail in our piece on scam calls and robocalls in Australia, and a lot of the same caution applies whether the call comes through a desk phone, a softphone or an app.
Business phone systems: what we’d tell a small business owner to do
Start with headcount and call volume, not features. If it’s you and maybe one other person answering the phone, an app-based business number is almost certainly the cheaper, simpler, perfectly adequate choice, and we’d argue most sole traders currently paying for a full VoIP system are overpaying for capability they don’t use. Once there’s a team fielding calls, or the business needs call queues, recording for compliance, or integration with a booking or CRM system, VoIP earns its cost.
Either way, check three things before signing anything: contract length, what happens to call handling if the internet drops, and whether the number is portable if you switch providers later. None of that is exciting to ask about, but it’s the difference between a phone system that quietly works in the background and one that becomes a monthly headache. If you’re also untangling other parts of the home or office network while you’re at it, our router security checklist covers the basics that apply just as much to a small office as a home.
The desk phone isn’t quite extinct, but for most small Australian businesses it’s become optional rather than essential, and that’s a genuinely good thing for anyone sick of paying for a line that mostly carries robocalls.
— Dale Whitfield, Founding Editor, Tech Geek
Featured image: AI-generated illustration.
