Cyber Monday is For Business Buyers Too

By: John Shepler

Cyber Monday is the new tradition for shopping online to get deals that you couldn’t in the rough and tumble of brick and mortar Black Friday sales. You’ll see numerous offers for special deals targeted at consumers today. But what about businesses? Is there such a thing as Cyber Monday for business?

There should be. Business purchases are a huge part of the economy. What’s more, what businesses have to pay for products and services reflects in the price consumers have to pay. If your business can get a bargain on Cyber Monday, it’s a win all the way around.

Let’s have a look at some things that you might not think are ripe for savings, yet actually are. While prices for these services might not be specific to this particular day, there’s still a huge incentive for you to take a closer look. You’ll likely find savings that you didn’t know were available. Whatever you save will pay off for months and years into the future.

1. T1 Lines
Just about every company has leased a T1 line at some point in its growth. Many still do, and new T1 lines are being provisioned every day. Why has this decades old telecom service retained its popularity in the face of technological advancement?

It’s hard to beat a winner. T1 lines have a long history of reliability and versatility. You can use a T1 line as a point to point private line, dedicated Internet access, MPLS network connection, or as a T1 or ISDN PRI telephone trunk for your telephone system. They offer the same bandwidth in both directions and are inherently low in latency.

What T1 lines have that many other telecom services don’t have is near universal availability. They come in on ordinary twisted pair telephone cable that is available to just about every business building. The one gripe has been cost. Ten years ago, T1 lines were pricey. You had to swallow hard and sign the contract if you needed connectivity. Today, prices are a fraction of what they used to be and are attractive to even very small businesses.

If you are unhappy with “consumer grade” broadband or have a T1 contract that is a few years old or more, you should get an instant price quote for T1 line services now.

2. Ethernet over Copper
Ethernet over Copper, also called EoC, is the direct competitor to T1 lines. EoC is a newer technology and uses the same twisted pair copper wires that provision T1. It’s also symmetrical in bandwidth, highly reliable and low in latency, jitter and packet loss.

What Ethernet over Copper offers is higher bandwidth and… Ethernet! While your phone system may still be a traditional Key Telephone System or PBX using analog POTS lines or ISDN PRI, your computer network is almost certainly based on Ethernet. EoC lets you connect to other locations or the Internet while keeping your packets in the Ethernet protocol all the way. This opens the door to services like E-LAN that let you set up a bridged LAN that includes locations across town or nationwide.

Unlike T1 that has a fixed bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps no matter the distance, EoC technology trades off speed for distance. If you are close to the central office you can get very high speeds, perhaps 50 Mbps or more. Farther away, available line speed drops off as the line length increases. Even so, most business locations can get 3 Mbps up to 10 or 20 Mbps using Ethernet over Copper. Even better, the cost per Mbps is usually lower than what you pay for T1… perhaps half as much.

If you are running out of bandwidth on your T1 line or want to see if you can get the same or higher bandwidth at a better price, you’ll want to check out Ethernet over Copper bandwidth speeds and prices for your locations.

3. Metro Ethernet over Fiber
If Ethernet over Copper is a good idea, Ethernet over Fiber is a even better one. Fiber optic networks have multiplied in recent years, with tentacles reaching into nearly every city around the globe. The other revolution is the rise of independent private carriers to compete with the traditional telephone companies. This competitive environment has expanded service availability and reduced prices.

If you’ve had fiber optic services for years, chances are that you have one of the legacy SONET telco fiber lines. These include OC3 at 155 Mbps, OC12 at 622 Mbps and OC48 at 2.4 Mbps. SONET is highly reliable and low in latency, jitter and packet loss. It traditionally has suffered from lack of availability, few fixed bandwidth levels, and high prices per Mbps compared to what is available now.

Yes, SONET is still a good fiber service to have. Prices have come down dramatically over the years. But Ethernet over Fiber is an even better deal. Like EoC, EoF keeps your traffic in the Ethernet protocol for easy interfacing, and the ability to get LAN-type connectivity among multiple locations.

it’s also highly scalable. You can get just about any bandwidth level you want between 10 Mbps and 10 Gbps. In some major business centers, speeds as high as 100 Gbps are available to businesses as well as carriers. What’s more, you can generally get your service upgraded quickly with just a phone call to your provider. Quickly means anything from a few hours to a week or so. Compare that with weeks or months if you need a SONET upgrade.

If you need bandwidth of 10 Mbps or higher for your business (not residential) location, it is well worth your while to take a few minutes this Cyber Monday (or any other day) and check out the fiber optic bandwidth and pricing options available right now.

4. Hosted PBX
Everybody knows what a business telephone is. It’s that box with a handset and dial pad that sits on your desk and has its own wiring to the phone company or an in-house phone system. Business phones are essential for business. The traditional phone systems aren’t so essential anymore. In fact, you are likely missing out on both features and cost savings if you aren’t looking at the new cloud hosted VoIP or cloud PBX phone services. So, let’s take a Cyber Monday shopping trip.

There are numerous companies offering “hosted” phone services. These range of single line VoIP telephone services all the way up to call centers in the cloud. They’re all based on the idea that if telephones can connect to the computer network, then the switching equipment can be located anywhere. Today, the best deals are cloud service providers who operate massive data centers dedicated to IP telephony.

Don’t confuse enterprise VoIP services with the low-end Internet VoIP services. They may use similar technology, but the trick to consistently high voice quality is a dedicated network connection between you and the provider. This is known as a SIP trunk. The bandwidth of the trunk determines how many simultaneous calls it will support. You can have a few lines or thousands. Only the speed of the connection changes.

What Hosted PBX does is change the way you pay for your phone service. Instead of making a major capital investment in equipment and ongoing maintenance expenses, you pay per phone per month to a service firm. That firm bears the cost and responsibility of running a highly reliable and easily scalable phone system for your company. All you have in-house are the IP phones plugged into your computer network and a specialized router to prioritize the voice traffic.

Is your phone system too small or getting a little “creaky”? Before you go out and drop a bundle on a shiny new in-house equipment rack, see how competitive and feature-filled a Cloud Hosted PBX service can be.

Now you see how Cyber Monday can be as asset to businesses beyond what you sell to consumers on this single day of the year. Use Cyber Monday as an incentive to shop for your business as well as yourself and get deals that will pay off handsomely for years.

SIP Trunking Providers Want Your Bandwidth

The telephone industry is changing. Not long ago, the standard setup for most companies was an in-house PBX system managing dozens, hundreds or thousands of phones. For outside calls, the most cost effective approach has been to bring in ISDN PRI trunk lines with 23 local and/or long distance lines each. Even small companies chose key telephone systems that can handle two to six outside lines. Those setups are changing fast.

There are two strong trends in the industry right now. One is cloud based hosted PBX telephone and the other is SIP trunking. They work perfectly together, but you can also have SIP trunking without cloud services.

A telephone trunk is a number of telephone lines all bundled together. This can be a wire bundle, such as a multi-line copper cable. It can also be an electrical bundle on a single line. ISDN PRI trunks, for instance, bundle 23 separate phone lines plus Caller ID and switching on a single T1 line. A SIP trunk is a telephone trunk line designed specifically to work with IP phones in VoIP telephone systems. SIP or Session Initiation Protocol is the switching technology used in VoIP in lieu of SS7, which is used in traditional switched circuit telephony.

So, why are SIP trunks such a hot item right now? It’s because a SIP trunk can be connected directly to your network or IP PBX to bring in multiple lines from your VoIP carrier. On a converged local area network, you are already running SIP. Why go to the trouble to converting to another protocol just to gain access to the public telephone network?

SIP trunks are also how you connect to a hosted PBX system as a cloud service. Companies are rapidly discovering that the per-seat cost of a cloud based telephone service is less than they pay now when you count the personnel, operating and maintenance costs of an in-house phone system. With hosted PBX, you no longer have to invest in new hardware every few years and your system is always being maintained and upgraded by the service provider.

It stands to reason that SIP trunking providers want your telephone business, but why do they want your bandwidth?

The reason that your carrier wants to provide you with both telephone lines and Internet bandwidth is so they can guarantee the quality of your phone calls. With traditional telephony, the telephone and computer networks are kept completely separate and cannot possibly interfere with each other. One of the cost saving advantages of enterprise VoIP solutions is that they use the corporate data network for everything. To make that work, you need to prioritize voice packets so that your phone conversations don’t distort or break up no matter what the computers are doing.

When your SIP trunking provider delivers both telephone and Internet service on your trunk line, they prioritize packets using CoS or Class of Service tags. These tags tell all equipment that recognizes them how to handle different types of traffic to ensure service quality. Not all bandwidth providers do this, so if you mix various line services you can wind up undoing your carefully engineered network quality.

There’s also a cost advantage, especially for small businesses who get both telephone and broadband on one line instead of two. You don’t even need IP phones to take advantage of this service. The provider will install an Integrated Access Device (IAD) that can connect to conventional analog phones and your broadband router.

Now that you know why SIP Trunking providers want your bandwidth, why not find out what sort of deal they’ll make to get it? Request competitive quotes for telephone trunking, dedicated Internet access and cloud hosted PBX services now.

Rise Of The Cloud Hosted PBX

The days of the in-house PBX or Private Branch Exchange may be numbered. AireSpring, one of the fastest growing and most innovative of the competitive carriers, is now offering a cloud hosted PBX system they call AirePBX. With AirePBX, the PBX disappears but the phones remain.

In a way, we're going back in time to move forward. In the beginning, all switching was done at the telephone company central office and all phones were connected to the telco switch. Then came in-house telephone operator switchboards and later automated switchboards called Key Telephone Systems (KTS) and Private Branch Exchanges (PBX). What a cloud hosted PBX does is move the switching system back to the service provider.

So, how can you save money by going back to an earlier network architecture? A lot has changed in the last century. For one thing, the monolithic “Ma Bell” no longer exists. There are a lot of competitive carriers vying for your business. That alone offers better pricing options. Technology has also changed. Phones no longer need their own network. With VoIP, the telephone shares the same network as all the company computers, printers and other devices. The fact that you don’t need special proprietary wiring to connect to your phone service provider further increases competitive offerings and available features.

The idea behind a hosted VoIP system or cloud hosted PBX is that the expensive PBX system and its need for constant attention is taken over by a supplier who is in the PBX telephone business. That’s not the business you are in, is it? In fact, having to buy, install and maintain this equipment doesn’t really give you a competitive advantage at all. It’s just one more thing you pay for to get the communications services you need.

This is why companies are more than happy to ditch their venerable PBX in favor of a cloud solution. They are especially open to this alternative if their PBX is temperamental, nearing capacity, too old to be maintained, or too limited in features. Sure, you can go out and buy a shiny new model and do a “forklift upgrade.” Stop and think, though. Do you really want to shell out the thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of dollars needed for a new PBX, or would you rather pay as you go?

Let’s take a look at what AirePBX has to offer. You don’t have a PBX system in-house anymore. You just have IP phones plugged into your network and AireSpring provides those. No capital investment required. Each phone has its own voicemail. You can even get visual voicemail. Even though the PBX is hosted remotely, your internal call routing is still free, as are local outside calls. An auto-attendant is included to direct incoming calls. You can set up hunting for workgroups, add toll free numbers and virtual private numbers, have conference calls, and enjoy all the features you’d expect in a modern business phone system.

All of this is fully managed by AireSpring on their next generation IP backbone network to ensure voice quality and system availability. Compared to the often dicey performance of Internet VoIP implementations, this is head and shoulders better. AirePBX is an enterprise VoIP solution that scales easily for small and medium companies, too.

Are you in search of a better business telephone system for your company? If so, you may be surprised and delighted by the capabilities and low costs of the new cloud hosted PBX solutions. Why not get a quote for hosted VoIP phone services and see if you can have the business communications you need without the cost and aggravation of maintaining your own in-house telephone system.