POTS Phone Service For Multiple Locations

Companies with many branch offices or other business locations spread out over the US, Canada and Puerto Rico can find themselves drowning in paperwork. Is it all the forms they need to file with the government? No, it’s just the phone bill... or should I say bills - lots and lots and lots of phone bills.

How does this happen? It happens a little at a time. First the business is established in a single location. They order business telephone services and dedicated Internet and the bill or 2 bills arrive each month. The manager or someone delegated pours over the bill each month looking for charges that don’t belong there, services that are no longer used, or employee abuse of phone privileges.

Soon the need arises for a branch office in the next state. That office orders its own phone service and gets its own bills. Each month, management at that site spends an hour or so perusing the bill before submitting it for payment.

Now, multiply this activity by 10, 20, 100, or 1,000 locations. Similar paper bills come in on completely separate accounts from completely separate phone service providers. The same reviews are simultaneously conducted. All the bills are separately submitted for payment. Can’t this all be coordinated somehow to achieve greater efficiency? Not hardly. Every locations has its own arrangement with its own incumbent or competitive service provider. Since each account is unique, there’s no commonality to take advantage of.

Now, replace that horror scenario with a single vendor that serves all locations and consolidates all those bills into one bill. This vendor has tools available for Telecom Expense Management (TEM) to make auditing telecom bills, tracking disputes and managing contracts a far easier task. Think of the hours saved when your bills are consolidated.

Who is this vendor? It is Ernest Communications, the nation’s largest telecom company that specializes in large multi-location POTS accounts through the United States. Ernest began in earnest, if you will, as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that opened the door to competitive local phone companies using the resources of the Public Switched Telephone Network. Since then, they’ve installed the facilities needed to give you reliable and affordable analog business phone service anywhere you locate.

Why analog? Isn’t the world going digital? True, large organizations are migrating to enterprise VoIP to converge their multi-location voice and data networks. This is a sophisticated process that offers cost and productivity improvements IF you can afford the capital expense involved and IF you have the resources to engineer, install and maintain the facilities.

Most smaller companies have only a handful of phones, maybe a dozen or two at each location. Some have only a single phone or a few multi-line desk sets that they picked up at the local office supply store. Their data network is a broadband connection to the Internet, if they even have one. What does the IT staff do all day? What IT staff?

These businesses are quite happy with traditional analog telephony, also called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. It’s reliable, voice quality is excellent and pricing is reasonable for a few phone lines. This is where Ernest Communications excels. They can do something other companies can’t. They can get you analog phone service for all locations you have and then consolidate the bills and offer extra benefits like blocking of 3rd party charges, elimination of hidden fees and highly competitive long distance rates.

If one or more locations is large enough to have an on-site PBX system, Ernest can supply a dedicated local PRI service to bundle up to 23 outside lines on one standard digital trunk line that plugs right into a jack on your PBX box. Are you using both telephone and Internet? Ernest offers Integrated T1 circuits that combine 6 telephone lines plus dynamically allocated broadband data on a single T1 line. They supply the Integrated Access Device that makes this system work.

Could you benefit from having a single competitive service provider who can get you excellent rates for each of your business locations, with service customized to meet your requirements and a consolidated bill to make telecom management easier? If you have multiple locations dealing with multiple phone companies, you should get competitive quotes for analog POTS telephone, Integrated T1 and ISDN PRI service that covers all of your needs with easy inclusion of future business expansion.

Cloud Communications Advantages Explained

Many companies are scratching their heads, wondering if it makes sense to move their communications to the cloud. XO Communications, a major competitive networking and telecom services provider, has a quick explanation of just why moving to the cloud makes sense. Take a minute and a half and see if this looks like something you should be doing...



XO’s Enterprise Cloud Communications does for multi-location businesses what basic hosted PBX services do for the SMB. It gets the organization out of the business of owning and managing a telephone system and into the role of a service user, albeit a sophisticated one.

By moving to a cloud hosted PBX and connecting via the extensive XO network from each location, you gain advanced features while keeping your calls “on net” to avoid telco toll charges. In addition to the usual local and long distance calling with standard business phone features, you gain high definition voice and video enterprise-wide and the ability to move calls seamlessly from your mobile phone to a fixed phone. Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) lets you make and receive calls from any device at any location with only one phone number, dial plan and voice mailbox.

Regardless of how many regional and branch offices you have and where they are, you may be able to integrate your entire operation in the XO cloud and avoid the headaches of capital investment, ongoing maintenance, full time staffing and periodic upgrades. All of that responsibility moves to the provider and you have peace of mind of knowing what it’s going to cost per employee per month.

Does cloud communications sound like it might be the right next move for your company? If so, get complete features, pricing and consultation for cloud networking services now. There are advantages for all size companies from small offices on up to the largest corporations.

Bandwidth To Support Branch Offices

Many companies have more than one location in a given area. These branch offices are especially important for businesses that want to have a presence as near their customers as possible. So, how do you seamlessly connect those branch offices to the main office without spending a fortune?

There are two high performance networking technologies available now that didn’t exist a generation ago, perhaps not even a decade ago in many locations. These are Metro Ethernet and MPLS Networks. Both are proving to offer high performance and attractive pricing compared to traditional telecom solutions.

Ethernet has always been though of as a local networking technology. Once it was adapted for long haul transmission, Carrier Ethernet technology made it possible to take Ethernet out of the office and run it all across town.

What does Metropolitan Ethernet have to offer? Ease of connection and efficiency of transmission are obvious advantages. With Metro Ethernet, there are no protocol conversions necessary in the network. Ethernet formatted packets flow from source to destination as generated.

Another advantage of keeping everything as Ethernet is that the entire network, LAN and WAN, can be set up for level 2 switching. This is ideal for business communications. The main and branch offices can all be on the same network, with the same access to resources regardless of where the user is located.

What might not be expected is that Ethernet services are generally much less expensive that traditional telco solutions of the same bandwidth. The increase in competition due to new carriers focusing on Ethernet connections has a lot to do with that.

The other technology you’ll be interested in is called MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching. It’s a way to create a secure high performance multi-point network that can transport nearly any protocol.

Competitive carriers as well as traditional telecom providers are turning to MPLS technology for their core networks. These networks can be carefully controlled for jitter, latency, bandwidth and packet loss. That makes them ideally suited for converged voice and data networks. You can have your telephone and computers on the same network and ensure that one service doesn’t interfere with the other.

Ethernet and MPLS networks are highly compatible. In fact, it’s not unusual for companies to connect nationwide or around the world with Ethernet in the last mile and MPLS “cloud” networks providing the long distance connectivity.

Do you have branch offices to support? If so, get price and availability quotes for Ethernet and MPLS services. You may be surprised at the options available for your business locations.

Qwest Embraces Ethernet over Copper to Reach Rural Business Locations

Qwest Communications is one of the country’s premier telecom services providers, with a fiber optic backbone that spans the nation with data transmission rates of 40 Gbps. Their next step up will be 100 Gbps. When major enterprises need serious bandwidth, they find that Qwest has all they need and then some. But what about those locations that are a bit off the beaten path? Are they pretty much out of luck or what?

Not any more they aren’t. While it’s true that remote offices of even the largest corporations have a hard time justifying the construction costs involved in trenching fiber cable so far away from the carrier POPs (Points of Presence), that doesn’t mean they can’t get significant bandwidth at decent prices.

The magic that makes it possible for even out of the way locations to get Ethernet services at Ethernet speeds is called Ethernet over Copper. The copper we’re talking about is standard twisted pair telephone cable. Not only that, it is the same telco cable that is already in the ground. Nearly every business location gets multiple pair cabling installed by the local telephone company during construction. It’s traditionally used for multi-line telephone service and, more recently, to bring in DSL and T1 broadband Internet access. The new way to employ the same old wires is to install specialized equipment to transport Ethernet signals over copper.

Qwest has just announced new Ethernet services for nationwide availability. These include 3 Mbps, 5 Mbps, 7 Mbps and 10 Mbps, all delivered over bonded copper pair. The bonding process is a software solution that combines what are normally separate signals on independent copper wire pairs so that they act as one much higher speed conduit. That process was originally employed by carriers to bond T1 lines to increase bandwidth beyond the 1.5 Mbps T1 limit. With different terminal equipment, those copper pair can now deliver Ethernet services as well. You need up to 8 pair to get the maximum 10 Mbps speed level.

Most smaller businesses and branch offices of medium and larger size businesses can run just fine with 10 Mbps bandwidth for last mile connectivity to MPLS networks, dedicated Internet connections, or Ethernet Virtual LAN service. Since the copper is already in place, construction costs are minimized and service can be deployed rapidly. They are also scalable. You can start off with 3 Mbps bandwidth, if that is all you need, and then scale up to 5, 7 or 10 Mbps as your business level requires.

Is your office, plant site or warehouse struggling with too limited bandwidth because you think that a speed increase is prohibitively expensive? You may be surprised and delighted by how much bandwidth you can get for the same budget you have now. The way to find out quickly is to check prices and availability for Ethernet over Copper service in your area right now.

XO Launches SIP for Multi-Location Businesses

XO Communications, a major competitive carrier, is now offering a solution for businesses with multiple locations to enjoy the benefits of enterprise VoIP throughout their far flung operations.

SIP trunking is fairly well established as a way to connect business locations to a telephone service provider for network efficiency and cost savings. XO expands on this idea with a multi-site SIP trunking solution. Instead of having each location separately connect to a remote service provider, the branch offices, warehouses, and other locations can now use their existing WAN (Wide Area Network) to connect SIP phones back to a home office IP-PBX system. Internal calls stay on the corporate network. Outside calls are transfered on a SIP trunk to XO, where they are terminated to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).

What does this mean for you as a business owner or network services manager? It’s an opportunity to reduce costs by reducing the number of PBX systems needed to support all your locations. There is also a cost advantage in eliminating local voice trunks to connect with customers and suppliers. If you are now maintaining separate voice and data networks at each location, you can merge them on to your existing WAN or use the XO MPLS IP-VPN solution as a cost effective voice and data WAN network.

A more subtle advantage to this arrangement is that each location will have access to the total trunk capacity of the organization rather than a local limitation. Locations can burst above their normal call capacity by sharing idle voice trunk capacity from other locations across the enterprise.

Once a multi-location or distributed enterprise SIP trunking strategy is in place, it becomes much easier to add additional locations. The basic infrastructure for handling enterprise wide telephony and connection to the outside world is already available. You simply need to add the telephone services for the new location incrementally.

This enterprise SIP solution is ideal for larger corporations or other organizations with many sites. But it could also work for any chain store, movie theater, gas station, quick serve restaurant or other franchise type business model where the home office manages voice and data for the individual stores. The efficiency of scale can offer considerable cost savings over “reinventing the wheel” at every location.

Do you have a multi-location business or distributed enterprise that might benefit from a cost savings through improving the efficiency of your voice and data networks? If so, it is certainly worth your while to take a closer look at enterprise VoIP solutions, including the new XO enterprise SIP offering.