The Importance Of Buying Ernest

If you are a company with dozens, hundreds or thousands of locations, what you’d really like to deal with is a national local phone company for your telecom needs. But national local is an oxymoron, right? Can there even be such a company?

There is and it’s called Ernest Communications. This organization is unlike no telephone company you’ve dealt with. It’s focus is large nationwide multi-location accounts needing telephone lines, data lines, wireless mobile, or all of these.

What type of businesses fall into this category? National or regional chain stores come to mind immediately. Also, hotels, motels, gas stations, financial services, healthcare, real estate offices, insurance companies, entertainment venues such as theaters, and quick service restaurants. You can probably think of more categories, including the business you are in.

Any company depending on franchises, branch offices or service centers is in the business of supporting a multitude of small local operations. Every one of them has communications needs. Now, would you like to deal with a hundred or thousand separate local service providers or one larger company that has the staffing, expertise and products to handle all your business. Not only does this make your life easier by having a single point of contact, but you’ll likely save money due to the economy of scale.

Ernest Communications has taken advantage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to gain access to the nearly 200 million local lines that make up the Public Switched Telephone Network. Ernest provides your local telephone service plus they include most of the common custom calling features such as Call Waiting and Caller ID. Directory Assistance and IntraLATA toll charges are included in flat rate and blended rate plans. They’ll block all 3rd party and casual billing charges. Long distance rates are competitive.

Nearly all locations now require reliable broadband as well as telephone services. Ernest can provide high speed Internet access with speeds from 1.5 Mbps to 45 Mbps with performance governed by Service Level Agreements (SLA). You’ll get professional installation and 24/7/365 monitoring, which is not always the case with other providers.

Does your company have enough employees at one or more locations that you use a key telephone system or in-house PBX? Ernest can provide you with the ISDN PRI digital telephone lines that you need.

Many companies also now depend on wireless communications as well as line services to get the job done. Think about field service and sales people. Ernest has perhaps the only nationwide wireless solution designed specifically for business use. You’ll be able to choose from a variety of handsets, smartphones and mobile data devices, including BlackBerry devices. You also have your choice of shared, pooled, bundled and pay-per-use plans.

Getting your telecom services from a single provider has the advantage of giving you a single bill that combines all your voice, mobility and data services. Plus you have the ease of management that comes from having a single point of contact for moves, adds, changes and deletes that are part of normal business activity.

Could your regional or national multi-location business simplify operations and save money by working with a nationwide communications company? Why not get a competitive quote for your voice, data and mobility services and see for yourself. Our Telarus consultants can help you with this, plus any of your higher bandwidth or international communications needs.

Is MagicJack The Next Ma Bell?

The telephone industry is in trouble, we're told. Young people are shunning the traditional landline phone service that their parents and grandparents treated as a necessity of life. The breakup of the Bell System into smaller independent companies serving regional areas says that there will never again be anything like the ubiquitous "Ma Bell" that served every home and business. Clearly, the once proud telephone network is a goner. Or is it?

It's true that cell phones have replaced traditional analog phone service for about a third of the population. Those in their teens and 20's don't remember a time when there wasn't wireless. They got their first cell phone in high school or college, in much the same rite of passage as teens traditionally get their first cars. Once untethered, why go back and pick up something as archaic as a telephone with a wire?

It's also true that the breakup of the Bell System resulted in such an upset in the industry that it will never be the same. For awhile the technology remained the same and only the names of newly competing phone companies changed. The one key resource was the copper telephone cable that had been installed to virtually every home and business over the preceding 100 year build-out of universal telephone service. CLECs or Competing Local Exchange Carriers leased these lines at cost from the ILECs or Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers, who maintained ownership of the wires. That worked just fine until the ILECs persuaded the government to let them charge retail, not wholesale, prices for leasing their lines. That ensured they could easily make a profit. It also changed a competitive playing field to one where the CLECs could no longer compete, and they pretty much all fell by the wayside.

Not being able to compete on analog phone service, savvy competitors found a way to bypass the ILECs and the high lease prices they demanded to use "their" phone wires. Instead, they leveraged another set of wires that came into most every home and business. Those were the wires that delivered broadband Internet service. By piggybacking on the broadband connection that people were already paying for, VoIP phone service providers essentially got their phone wires for free.

That's why VoIP providers can offer such good deals on bundled local and long distance service. They use the Internet to transport digitized phone conversations between your location and their facilities. At those facilities they "terminate" or connect with the traditional PSTN, or Public Switched Telephone Network, so that VoIP users can call landline or cell phone users.

It looked like VoIP companies were in the catbird seat until yet another type of phone company came on the scene. Instead of charging around $20 a month for unlimited local and long distance service, this company was offering unlimited bundled service for around $20 a year, over a 90% cost cut. How can any company offer prices this low and still survive? How can VoIP providers stay in business any more than wireline CLECs could when they lost the competitive advantage?

The company that's causing the latest upset in the telephone business is MagicJack. The secret to their business model is that they are a hybrid between a traditional wireline telephone company and a VoIP provider. The parent company of MagicJack, YMax, is a registered CLEC throughout the country. In essence, YMax is a nationwide phone company in the image of Ma Bell, sans the traditional analog phone wires. They get around this limitation by using your broadband Internet to connect with their central offices.

Owning their own network to carry the calls saves YMax the cost of leasing other people's facilities. They still have to pay termination fees for calls that leave their network, but they also collect termination fees from other phone companies when someone calls a MagicJack number. So if the majority of users had MagicJack, YMax would collect far more in termination fees than they would spend. At some point they would become the default nationwide phone company and claim the title of Ma Bell II. Maybe Momma Jack or MoJo would be more appropriate.

Now you can see the method behind the magic of offering MagicJack phone service for the cost of the USB hardware that connects your phone to your computer so it can use the DSL or Cable broadband line, plus about $20 a year for service instead of a monthly phone bill. The MagicJack is reportedly selling at a clip of 9,000 to 10,000 units per day. If they can keep this up, how long will it be until the tipping point is reached and they own the residential landline business?

OK, but what about those younger and more mobile users who don't want a wire of any kind tethering their phone to a particular location? YMax is getting ready to go after a slice of this market with a new product called the FemtoJack. It will also plug into your computer. But instead of a wire to your home phone, it will connect wirelessly to your cell phone. The idea is that while you are home you'll make your calls over the Femto Jack instead of burning your monthly minutes on the cellular network. If your house has a dead zone for cellular, this will be an even better deal.

The next question is whether YMax will settle for having a major piece of the residential phone service business, assuming an even savvier competitor doesn't come on the market. Or, will they start working their way into the business market or launch a VoIP wireless network to really take on the cellular carriers? Those would be even more ambitious projects, but they are the key to dominating telephone service in the future.

Getting Cavalier About Ethernet

Can you afford to be cavalier about Ethernet as your company's electronic connection to the World? Can you afford not to be?

Being cavalier in this case means being with Cavalier Telephone, the competitive telecom services provider. Cavalier's Ethernet services have just been added to the GeoQuote (tm) search tool on our Shop For Ethernet service. But the only thing "casual" about Cavalier is the ease of finding the bandwidth services you need to support your growing business.

Cavalier Telephone is a regional CLEC or Competitive Local Exchange Carrier serving 15 states in the Eastern and Southern USA, including Washington D.C. They have network build-outs in 531 end offices and 11,000 fiber optic route miles, reaching more than 1.5 million businesses. If your business location is fortunate enough to be in the Cavalier service footprint, you could be saving money with one or more of their high performance voice and data services.
Cavalier Ethernet offers full duplex Carrier Ethernet service directly to your business. You can choose from 3 Mbps, 5 Mbps or 10 Mbps service levels, depending on how much bandwidth you need. That includes up to 13 static IP addresses and service availability of 99.9% guaranteed by a service level agreement.

Carrier Ethernet and its in-town equivalent, Metro Ethernet, are the rage right now. On a cost per Mbps basis, Ethernet usually offers the best value for business bandwidth. Sometimes the savings are as much as 50% to 90% less than equivalent SONET fiber optic services. Plus, it's Ethernet. Connecting to the WAN network is as easy as extending your own local area network. You just plug your switch or router into the RJ-45 connector and you've got Carrier Ethernet.

In addition to Ethernet, Cavalier Telephone offers a wide array of competitive services for business users. These include T1 and ISDN PRI telephone trunk lines, local and long distance calling service, Both full and fractional T1 lines, multi-line hunt groups, Frame Relay, DS3 and OCx high speed data, plus colocation facilities with rack and cage rental.

Are you paying too much for your voice and data bandwidth? Chances are the answer is YES. You don't know what you are missing until you check pricing and availability for the services you need from a suite of over 30 competitive providers. It's all made simple through our Ethernet Today and T1 T3 today online services. Give them a try now, to get a better deal through Cavalier Telephone and other excellent service providers.