MS Operator Connect

No 1 in Teams: Unpacking Voice Solutions with Vox and Operator Connect

Posted on 2 July 20241 August 2024 by Vivienne Fouche

A quick and easy way to integrate Voice calling into Teams – no matter where your employees are working from

Using Microsoft Teams has proven itself as an excellent platform for calling, holding meetings and collaborating with colleagues working remotely or from office spaces in different parts of the country. Teams has been proven to keep effective communications going among skilled colleagues no matter where in the country – or the world – they might be based.

Did you know that in addition, with Microsoft Operator Connect, businesses can quickly and easily integrate Voice calling into Teams, saving on costs and enhancing communications and efficiencies further?

As a Microsoft Operator Connect partner, Vox hosts and manages the infrastructure required for VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, or calls made over the internet) as well as PSTN[1] calling (meaning calls made over landline), using Teams, powered by Microsoft Azure.

By enhancing the integration of Vox’s low-latency, quality-controlled Voice Network with Microsoft Teams, Operator Connect offers streamlined, fully-managed Vox Voice services and radically improved call quality. With Operator Connect, users can make, receive, transfer, forward and put a Voice call on hold from any location via a Teams-enabled computer or smart device.

Vox and Microsoft Operator Connect

Customers can connect their existing phone numbers to Microsoft Teams or obtain new numbers, manage their calling plans, and configure their call routing right from within Microsoft Teams. This is particularly helpful for the IT department – your technicians can quickly assign numbers without needing to go through external providers, and can manage everything from one place.

By subscribing to Operator Connect, Teams users get a telephone number on which they can make and receive calls. Users can call any phone number in the world and receive calls from anyone in turn, from their mobile phone or computer.

With Operator Connect, Teams replaces the company’s old handsets, and users make and receive phone calls directly within Teams.

Benefits of partnering with Vox and Operator Connect include:

Migrate your current Vox Voice services or port numbers from your existing operator quickly and easily (Geographic and Non-Geographic numbers).
Operator Connect is designed to be easy for the IT team to use from the Teams Admin Centre.
The solution is budget-friendly: One of the benefits of Operator Connect is that by enabling Voice calling directly from Microsoft Teams on PC or mobile phone, no other hardware is required.
Vox provides tech support and service level agreements (SLAs) for excellent trouble-shooting and ongoing reliability.
Significant savings: With either Unlimited or Post-Paid Voice packages to choose from, Vox will tailor a calling plan suited to your business needs.
Every customer receives the most secure and value-rich solution as default, with active 24/7/365 fraud monitoring and guaranteed 99.9% uptime, with punitive SLA clauses should we not deliver on our promise.
Quality of service: Your Microsoft Teams and Voice traffic is prioritised above all other traffic travelling across your Fibre connection. This means that your Teams and Voice calls will not be interrupted by other activity happening on your network. This is a proprietary service offered by Vox on your Vox home or business Fibre last mile link.

Teams and Vox: A Winning Combination

Subscribing to Operator Connect is not difficult at all – just click here to enquire, and then a Vox expert will contact you and guide you through the quick and simple subscription process.

Once you accept, we’ll establish a trunk connection for you, assist you to provision users and assign phone numbers directly from the Teams Admin Centre so you can start making calls – it’s friendly on the bottom line, hassle-free, secure and tailored to your unique business requirements.

Simply subscribe to Operator Connect from Vox and leave the rest to us.

[1] The PSTN (Publicly Switched Telephone Network) is the network that carries your voice calls when you call from a landline or cell phone. It refers to the worldwide network of voice-carrying telephone infrastructure, including privately-owned and government-owned infrastructure.

Unlock Savings and Stay Connected with Vox Voice

Posted on 19 January 20249 December 2025 by Andrew King

Vox Voice is built to keep businesses talking — without the high bills that often come with interruptions such as loadshedding. By combining cloud telephony, mobile softphones and smart routing, Vox Voice reduces outbound and inbound voice costs while keeping customers and teams connected, wherever they are.

Why rethink business voice?

Even when the lights go out, customer enquiries keep coming. Many organisations fall back on costly cellular calls and reimburse staff, or they tolerate dropped customer calls. Vox Voice removes those compromises. Our solutions maintain corporate call rates, avoid expensive per‑minute cellular billing and reduce the administrative burden of expense claims — all while giving you the resilience your business needs.

How Vox Voice cuts your costs

Use one number, two endpoints: Vox lets employees use the same corporate SIP number on desk phones and mobile devices (via the Vobi app). Calls automatically follow the active endpoint, so desk‑to‑mobile switchover is seamless and billed at VoIP business rates.
Per‑second billing: Our VoIP outbound calls are charged per second rather than per minute — a simple way to cut calling costs, especially on frequent short calls.
Unify telephony and mobile: Avoid reimbursing staff for cellular calls. With the right Vox Voice setup, employees make and receive business calls on their mobiles at corporate VoIP rates.
Flexible deployment: Cloud PBX, hosted PBX or operator‑integrated voice — choose what fits your budget and scale as you grow.

Solutions for every business size

Vobi (mobile softphone): Ideal for businesses with hybrid or remote staff. Vobi pairs mobile devices to your office number, keeping rates low and continuity high. The app is free to install; licensed at the competitive Vox business rates.
3CX Cloud (medium businesses): Fully managed cloud PBX that emphasises mobility. Users get free unlimited apps for iOS and Android and can make and receive calls from anywhere using their office number — perfect for businesses that can’t rely solely on on‑prem power.
Operator Connect (Microsoft Teams): For organisations standardised on Teams, Vox’s Operator Connect bridges your Teams licences with a managed, low‑latency voice network, turning Teams into your unified Voice platform.

Loadshedding resilience — practical options

Loadshedding often causes the last‑mile power outage (ONT or router), not a network outage. Here are our Vox Voice strategies to maintain service:

Softphone failover: When desk phones lose connection, calls failover to the Vobi app on mobiles automatically — same SIP number, same corporate rates.
Cloud PBX hosting: Host your PBX in the cloud rather than on premise to avoid PBX power dependency.
Last‑mile redundancy: Use alternative last‑mile access (LTE/5G, wireless) where needed to keep your telephony trunk online.

Additional business benefits

One invoice option: Combine voice with other Vox services for simpler billing and greater stickiness.
Centralised management and reporting: Gain visibility into call costs and employee usage to drive smarter expense policies.
24/7 support: Vox backing with national support ensures rapid assistance when you need it most.

How to get started

Assess your telephony needs (number of users, hybrid working, call volumes).
Choose an appropriate Vox Voice solution — Vobi + Verto for SMEs; 3CX or Operator Connect for larger deployments.
Add last‑mile redundancy where required (LTE/5G or wireless).
Deploy and train staff on softphone usage to ensure seamless failover during outages.

Want a tailored quote or a resilience assessment? Enquire now about Vox Voice and let us design a voice solution that saves costs and keeps your business connected.

Microsoft Operator Connect – Vox and Microsoft join forces

Posted on 1 June 20221 August 2024 by Andrew King

Vox has announced the launch of its Microsoft Operator Connect offering, enabling business customers to make and receive telephone calls within the Microsoft Teams application.

Listen to an interview with Aki Anastasiou and the team about hybrid working and how your organisation can benefit from this collaboration tool.

Microsoft Operator Connect from Vox – optimised unified communications for the South African market

Posted on 30 May 20221 August 2024 by Andrew King

Vox has announced the launch of its Microsoft Operator Connect offering, enabling business customers to make and receive telephone calls within the Microsoft Teams application. By adding voice calling, Microsoft Teams presents organisations of all sizes with a complete, integrated unified communications and collaboration platform.

In simple terms, by subscribing to Operator Connect from Vox, organisations can easily equip every Microsoft Teams user with a telephone number, enabling these users to receive telephone calls within Teams and to make calls from Teams to anyone that has a phone number. And because it is cloud-based, users only require a Teams-enabled, and appropriately licensed computer or smart device, significantly saving costs and facilitating faster deployment times.

As one of the first South African Telco’s to be approved by Microsoft to provide the service, Vox can enhance organisational productivity and maximise the return on investment that organisations have already made in their Teams environments.

“With Operator Connect, organisations can retain their existing phone numbers and gain access to a fully managed, cloud phone system with zero hardware footprint. With Microsoft Teams, and Vox’s locally hosted and managed cloud SBC infrastructure, employees can benefit from the collaboration tools and global voice services that help them stay connected and productive in a distributed working environment,” says Andrew King, Head of Division: Voice, Visual Comms & Gaming at Vox.

The customer journey starts within the Teams Admin Centre, empowering organisations to request and rapidly deploy voice services throughout their operational footprint. By selecting Vox as a preferred telco operator from within the Teams Admin Centre, an organisation can completely replace all existing PBX infrastructure with a cloud-hosted phone system, which is essential when designing and supporting a hybrid work environment.

“Vox has been providing the South African market with Teams voice calling for the past two years by way of a multi-tenanted Direct Routing offering called TeamsVoice – Operator Connect now supports a closer alignment between Microsoft Teams and Vox with joint service level management and enhanced integrations between the two companies. This sees a completely granular pairing of the Vox Voice network with the Teams environment,” adds King.

Operator Connect is the ideal calling option for Teams users who want to choose their own telco operator, customise their voice services, reduce hardware expenses, improve the quality of their voice services and lessen the burden of technical support.

“In this new hybrid world of work, workspace no longer stops at the office and leaders need to consider how to equip all employees with the tools they need to contribute – whether they’re working from home, in the office or on the go.

“Technology has a key role to play to make this hybrid environment work for everyone. Vox is well-established in the South African market and provides the agility that Microsoft is looking for in a local partner,” says Colin Erasmus, Director of Modern Workplace and Security at Microsoft South Africa.

Add to this Vox’s proprietary last mile Quality of Service that provides digital voice quality that is far superior to any other service available in the market today.

“Vox has completed the rigorous Microsoft testing requirements of its infrastructure to provide companies with the peace of mind that the infrastructure is vetted to the highest world-class quality standards. Microsoft Operator Connect is the ultimate unified communications solution for the modern workplace,” concludes King.