Yes, You ARE Overpaying For Your Phone and Data Lines

By: John Shepler

With the economic future highly in question, every business needs to take a long, hard look at what it takes to survive. With future income uncertain and likely reduced, a good place to focus is on reducing expenses. Telecom lines, including data, telephone and Internet, can be a major monthly bill. It’s highly likely that right now you are paying more, perhaps much more, than you could be for the same quality of service.

Who’s Gouging Me?
Probably no one is cheating you or even taking advantage of your business. If you like, blame it on the gremlins. You know, those sneaky little critters that make everything break at the worst possible time. They also know how to bleed your budget without you ever knowing.

First, Get Rid of the Waste
You are paying for stuff you don’t need. I suspect you are paying for stuff that you don’t even use. How can that be? Anyone who has ever cleaned house has discovered all sorts of unopened christmas presents, products still in their original packaging, and food way past its safe date. The same is true in business. Things get bought. Some never get used. Others are used awhile, then the situation changes and they are set aside… just in case. Just in case never comes back again.

The worst offenders are subscriptions and contracts you pay for monthly but don’t get any value from. Right now, pull the bills for the last few months related to computing and telecom services. Services are especially sneaky at bleeding your budget because they are often out of sight and out of mind. You don’t trip over them like you do a big piece of equipment.

Now, grab a cup of coffee and go to a quiet space with your bills and some highlighters. You have to walk through these from top to bottom and question everything. Are there lines installed that aren’t being used anymore? Are there cell phone numbers that stopped being used when people left long ago? What about special fax machine lines, alarm connections, direct lines to buildings you got rid of? More DID numbers than you can possible use today? Toll Free numbers you don’t even advertise? Highlight them all. They’ve got to go.

Save a Bundle on What You DO Need
Now that you’ve made arrangements to delete all that extra costly clutter that adds no value, you’re left with the essentials. Of course you need phone lines and broadband service. You may need a direct connection to a cloud service provider or another office. You may well want managed security instead of having to keep someone on staff to fend off cybercriminals. Don’t cut so far to the bone that you hurt your ability to do business. Just get a better deal.

There’s a little secret about telecom services that escapes notice most of the time. Business lines, especially the dedicated ones like T1, DS3, SONET and Carrier Ethernet, are sold on contract. Usually you commit for at least a year, but probably take a 3 year contract for better pricing. Nothing wrong with that. It’s what happens at contract expiration that matters.

You might be tempted to simply renew the same contract at the same price, figuring you are lucky to avoid price inflation. Wrong. This industry is highly competitive and technology is advancing constantly. That translates into lower prices, not higher. For the same money you should get more bandwidth. Otherwise you should get a lower price for the next 3 years at the same bandwidth.

When New is Cheaper
Upgrading your technology could actually save rather than cost. Still nursing an old PBX system that needs maintenance and has pricy replacement parts? Have a look at
VoIP cloud service providers and let them manage the switching gear. All you need is phones and a SIP trunk to the cloud. You also gain new features that old analog desk phones can’t support.

Fiber optic bandwidth connections used to cost an arm and couple of legs. Not anymore. If you are in a built-up, not rural, area there is probably lots of fiber in the ground and overhead. Even the cable companies are leasing out extra fiber capacity. You might find that an upgrade in bandwidth could cost less than you pay for copper service now.

Running your own servers used to be the only way to go. Not anymore. In fact, it’s hard not to save money by pulling the plug and getting your infrastructure in the cloud. This is especially true if you need special high capacity lines to handle customer traffic. That bandwidth is likely cheaper at the remote data center and you’ll only need a lower bandwidth connection to manage the cloud services from your location.

Well, what do you think? Is there opportunity for cost saving in your business? Give these ideas at least a good look before you decide you are doing as well as you can. That includes getting a new current set of competitive quotes on all your line services, telephone, wireless and cloud services to see what might be available that you don’t know about.

So Many Locations, So Little Budget

By: John Shepler

Your company has lots of locations and guess what? They all need to be connected. That has traditionally meant big bucks and some pretty heavy IT staffing to make sure that all the phone calls, file transfers and applications run transparently for your employees and customers. It’s more than possible that you’ve long settled for less capability than you really need just because of the sheer cost involved. Does it still need to be that expensive to get connected? Perhaps not so much anymore.

Why Connecting Business Locations Cost a Fortune
The traditional business connection has been the telecom private line. These started out as T1 lines when 1.5 Mbps was big bandwidth and moved up to DS3 and then OC3 and higher bandwidth SONET fiber as capacity needs increased. All of these were sold as point to point dedicated private lines. One line from headquarters to each remote site. The more sites, the more lines.

Dedicated private lines weren’t cheap to begin with. There is also no economy of scale. Two lines cost twice as much as one line. Lines in rural areas cost more, perhaps a lot more, than the same line downtown in a big city.

How do you interconnect a dozen sites so that they can all talk and exchange data? You set up routers and PBX or IPBX systems at HQ and have your IT team operate a fully meshed network.

Let Someone Else Run the Network to Save Money
MPLS or Multi-Protocol Label Switching networks were designed to let you outsource the big multi-site network. A private operator runs a multi-tenant network using a proprietary protocol that routes traffic only on this dedicated network. It’s reasonably secure and has all the bandwidth you need.

Best of all, you are only using part of the network’s capacity so you only have to pay a fee for the portion you need. You also don’t have the network management headaches. The MPLS operator handles everything. You still have the cost of private lines from each location to the net, but not the expense of private interstate or international long lines.

The Cheapest Network of All
The big, beautiful public Internet connects just about everyone, everywhere. There’s more capacity than all of us will ever need. Plus, it’s cheap. Your small fraction of the cost of running the Internet is built into your connection charge. It’s inherently a mesh network, so all you need to do is get a broadband connection at each of your locations and whatever servers you need back at the home office. You might even rent servers in the cloud and offload that responsibility.

Now, the downside. Cheap doesn’t mean cheap and perfect. You and everyone else in the world are on this network and your critical business apps have no more priority than than binge watchers in a video feeding frenzy. Security is a joke. Every scam artist has tools to hack the web or make your life miserable by jamming your servers if they can’t rob you blind. Is this Internet really worth the trouble?

Mix and Match to Optimize Cost / Performance
A plain vanilla Internet connection may not be all you need for your business. It depends. SSL security makes it possible for millions of people to use their browsers to bank and buy things with confidence every day. You can install security appliances in line with your servers to mitigate denial of service attacks and intrusions. You can even outsource this complication by ordering managed security in the cloud.

How about priority service for sensitive applications like VoIP telephone calls and business critical cloud services? You may or may not find Internet performance good enough. One tradeoff is to use dedicated last mile connections versus shared low cost broadband. The core of the Internet runs pretty fast. It’s that local connection, especially the lowest cost ones, that get oversubscribed and bog down.

Why not get the best compromise by using both? Your really, really sensitive packets may not be all that bandwidth demanding but are highly latency dependent. Meanwhile, the bulk of file transfer activity, video streams, email, and page views work just fine over low-end broadband connections and are good with typical broadband latency. A newer technology called SD-WAN or Software Defined Wide Area Networking employs a smarter router connected to two or more Internet connections to pick and choose what packet goes down what path. Dedicated T1 lines or a low capacity MPLS network service can handle phone calls while a higher speed cable broadband line takes care of general web access.

If you have been frustrated by the high cost of connecting your multiple business locations, it’s time to take another look as line prices have plummeted and new technology offers higher performance from cheaper connections. See what’s available in the way of cloud communications, SD-WAN, MPLS networks and dedicated and shared broadband lines that can give you a lot more capacity for your limited budget now.

Times Are Tough, Cell Phones Are Free

Just about all of us are feeling the pinch these days. The business forecasts you see on TV indicate that we're heading into a recession, not out of one. That suggests that it's time to batten the hatches and start conserving cash for tough times to come. Here's one idea on how to keep hundreds of dollars in your wallet and still get the cellphone service you want and need.

Chances are that you do your cell phone shopping at an official carrier store or one of the big box office supply stores or electronics retailers. Regardless of where you drop in to check out the phones, these stores all have one thing in common. They're likely going to charge you for your cell phone.

So? Isn't that the price of getting a new model phone? You buy the phone and sign a contract for monthly service, right?

Nope. Not if you want to get the best phone deals, you don't. A little understood standard in the wireless business is that the cellular service plans cost the same regardless of where you buy them. But the price of the phone is up to the dealer. You can pay $500. You can pay $50. Or you can pay nothing for the phone. Your monthly service plan will cost the same, depending on how many minutes you need and what add-on services you sign up for.

So why would you not want a free phone? It's the same phone regardless of where you get it. You'll pay the carrier the same price for service every month. But if you shop smart, you can pay a lot less for that cell phone. You can get many models for free. Some even have cash back rebates. How's that sound?

OK, let me give show you some examples of popular phones that you can get for free or with a rebate right now. By the time you read this, the offers may have changed. That's life in the cell phone biz. But there are always some models on special offer with prices at $0 to -$50. That's $50 cash back. So here we go as of today...

What you need to do is check the current specials at Cell Phone Plans Finder and then search for the phone model you want if you don't see featured it on the front page. Or just browse around and see what catches your fancy. Your big problem is going to be picking just one.

Well, actually, you don't even have to do that. You can get a family plan and have all sorts of different phones on it. Potential savings? Hundreds? Thousands? It all depends on how sophisticated your tastes are and how many phones you order. Now stuff that money you save under the mattress or put it in the bank before you go blow it on something else.