Do I need a Calling Plan with Teams Phone?

Teams Phone is the phone system. Microsoft's add-on licensing page describes Teams Phone Standard as an add-on license that provides PBX capabilities such as cloud voicemail, call transfer, auto attendants and call queues. We cover that license in which Teams Phone license you need.

The same page calls a Calling Plan "an add-on license to Teams Phone for making calls to the PSTN," and adds that with this option Microsoft is your PSTN carrier. The PSTN is the public switched telephone network, the one landlines and mobiles are on. So a Calling Plan is a carrier service that happens to be sold as a license.

The two get confused because Microsoft also sells them together. The Teams Phone with Calling Plan bundle is a single add-on that includes both, and anyone who buys it sees one product. Buy Teams Phone Standard alone and you have a phone system with no route to outside numbers until you add one. Microsoft's Teams Phone overview says so directly: "A PSTN solution is separate from a Teams Phone license." We set the two side by side in the difference between Teams Phone and a Calling Plan.

With a Calling Plan, Microsoft is the operator. Its PSTN connectivity page says the phone numbers, the access to the phone network and the support for the service all come from Microsoft. The Calling Plans page calls this the simplest option for connecting Teams Phone to the PSTN.

There are three plans, and all three include unlimited incoming minutes. They differ in which outgoing calls they cover and how those calls are billed.

Included minutes are pooled. All users in the same country on the same plan share one pool. Microsoft's example is 100 users in the United States on the Domestic plan. Each is allocated 3,000 minutes a month, so the group shares 300,000 a month, and calls beyond the pool are billed per minute. A team with a few heavy callers and many light ones can stay inside the pool because of that.

Microsoft sells Calling Plans in some countries and regions and not in others. Where they aren't sold, its documentation points you to the other connectivity options.

The other three routes replace Microsoft as the carrier. Operator Connect uses a carrier from Microsoft's certified program. Teams Phone Mobile uses a certified mobile operator and makes the number on a user's SIM their Teams number. Direct Routing connects any carrier through a certified session border controller, the device that sits between the carrier's network and Teams. Microsoft's licensing page says each of these requires a Teams Phone license. It lists them as the alternatives to buying a Calling Plan.

Atlantech Online's Operator Connect service shows what takes the Calling Plan's place. On its Operator Connect page, the carrier says it manages the PSTN calling services and the session border controllers. It publishes a flat-rate option at "as low as $3 per user/month," with unlimited calling in the US, number porting and support listed. That figure is a floor, and Atlantech quotes the price for a given organization on request.

The $3 buys the carrier's part, which is the job a Calling Plan would otherwise do. The Teams Phone license is still required and is not part of the carrier's $3. A published floor also doesn't settle which route costs less for you, because that depends on the quote you get and on which Calling Plan those users would otherwise need. We work through the totals in how much Teams Phone costs.

Outside calling doesn't always mean a phone number for every person. Microsoft's Shared Calling lets a group of users make and receive outside calls through the phone number of a resource account attached to an auto attendant. Those users each need a Teams Phone license. The number belongs to the shared account.

A Calling Plan makes sense when you want Microsoft to be both your phone system and your phone carrier, and Microsoft sells plans where your users are. Microsoft's own comparison describes it as the fit for organizations that want a fully Microsoft-managed calling service with the simplest deployment.

The same comparison says who the other routes suit. Operator Connect is for organizations that want to work with a participating carrier while managing users and numbers in Teams. If the carrier you already use is in the program, that is a reason to look there first. Direct Routing is for organizations that need advanced telephony integration or support for existing infrastructure, such as a PBX that has to stay in service. We compare those two in Direct Routing versus Operator Connect, and the wider decision is in choosing a PSTN connectivity option.

You also don't have to give one answer for the whole company. Microsoft says a tenant can combine routes for different users and locations. Suppose your headquarters is in a country where Calling Plans are sold and a branch office is in one where they aren't. The headquarters users can have Calling Plans while the branch uses a local carrier through Operator Connect or Direct Routing. Both groups are on the same Teams Phone system and can call landlines and mobiles the same way.