Plenty of businesses run their IT with one company and their phones with another. It's how things ended up rather than a decision anyone made, the phone system came with the building, the IT provider came later, and nobody has revisited it since.
With ISDN and PSTN lines being switched off, most businesses are being forced to revisit it anyway. So it's worth asking whether splitting the two still makes sense.
Phones are IT now
The separation made sense when a phone system was a box on the wall with copper lines running into it. That world is ending. Modern telephony is software running over your network, authenticating against your directory, and integrating with Microsoft 365 and your CRM.
A 3CX system depends on your firewall configuration, your switches, your QoS settings, your internet connection and your endpoints. Every one of those is IT. Treating the phone system as a separate discipline means treating half the dependencies as somebody else's problem.
Where the split actually hurts
Nobody owns the fault. Call quality drops. The telecoms provider tests the SIP trunk, finds it clean, and says it's the network. The IT provider tests the network, finds it clean, and says it's the trunk. You're the one running the meeting between them.
Change control breaks. Your IT provider updates firewall firmware on a Saturday. Monday morning, one-way audio. Neither party knew the other's work mattered.
Onboarding takes twice as long. A new starter needs an account, a laptop, a mailbox, and separately, an extension, a handset and a voicemail box. Two tickets, two providers, two timelines.
Security gets fuzzy. VoIP fraud is real and expensive. When responsibility for the phone platform sits outside the security remit, nobody is watching the international call spend at 3am.
Nobody plans it together. Bandwidth planning, connectivity upgrades and headcount growth all affect both. Split ownership means neither provider sees the whole picture.
What consolidating actually gives you
One number to call, one accountability. When something breaks, the question of whose fault it is becomes internal, and it gets fixed instead of debated.
Coordinated change. Firewall work, switch upgrades and phone system changes are planned together because the same team schedules them.
Faster onboarding and offboarding. One request covers account, device, mailbox and extension. It also means leavers lose everything at once, which matters more than it sounds.
Better design decisions. The team specifying your leased line knows what call volume it needs to carry. The team configuring the network sets QoS with the phone system in mind.
Simpler commercials. One contract, one invoice, one review meeting. Not a headline benefit, but it saves real admin time.
Integrated reporting. Things like a 3CX call wallboard work properly when whoever runs your IT also runs your telephony data.
The fair counter-argument
Consolidation isn't automatically right. A specialist telecoms provider may have deeper expertise in a complex contact centre setup than a generalist IT company. If your requirements are genuinely specialist, that expertise can outweigh the coordination cost.
The test is simple: does your IT provider genuinely do telephony, with certified engineers and reference clients, or do they subcontract it and pass the ticket along? A single point of contact that's really a middleman gives you the worst of both.
LeapIT is a 3CX Authorised Partner and we deploy, configure and support the systems ourselves, alongside the IT support and cyber security side of the same environment.
The PSTN switch-off makes this urgent
Traditional analogue and ISDN lines are being retired. If you're still on them, you're migrating whether you planned to or not, and that migration touches your network, your firewall and possibly your connectivity. Our guide to the PSTN switch-off covers the timeline and what to check.
Doing that migration with one team that owns the whole path is considerably less painful than coordinating two.
Worth reviewing?
If your phone contract is up for renewal, or you're being pushed off ISDN, that's the natural moment to look at it. We handle both sides for businesses across Birmingham, Solihull and the West Midlands, book a call and we'll review what you've got without any obligation.
