Bandwidth Cost Reduction Ideas

It’s not all about cost these days, but getting the best deal you can on everything you buy is important for the viability of the business. Bandwidth is no exception. Telecom costs can be a major line item expense. Fortunately, there are ways to save without having to pick a service that degrades your productivity.

The most basic step you can take is one that might come as a surprise. It works for any technical requirement, can be accomplished in a matter of minutes, and won’t cost you a thing. Guess what it is yet?

The simplest solution is sometimes the most effective. Get a fresh set of competitive quotes. Honestly, if you haven’t been in the market for telephone line or data bandwidth prices lately, the numbers you have in mind are almost certainly obsolete. Things are changing that fast.

So how can you do this in minutes when last time it took a week to find 3 to 6 providers, discuss your needs with each of them, and then wait and wait for formal quotes? Put the power of automation to work. There’s an online application for this and it’s called GeoQuote by Telarus. This is an automated pricing engine that connects with dozens of service providers and aggregates their price quotes. For wireline services like T1 lines, ISDN PRI telephone, DS3 and even Ethernet connections to 1 Gbps, the process runs automatically and gives you budgetary pricing on your computer screen in a minute or so. Other services, like SONET fiber optic lines or MPLS networks need some human intervention, so you’ll probably wait a few hours to a day or so for these quotes.

Now that you have service pricing, you can start working tradeoffs. For instance, if you’ve got the newer Ethernet over Copper available for your business location or locations, you’ll likely find that you can get twice the bandwidth of a T1 line for the same price. Or replace a bonded T1 solution with 3x3 Mbps EoC and cut your monthly line cost in half.

You’ll find the same it true for higher bandwidth services, such as DS3 or OC-3 fiber. Ethernet likely comes-in much cheaper for the same line speed and service level agreement.

How about telephone? There’s a fairly simple tradeoff between multiple analog phone lines and a digital trunk like IDSN PRI. Anywhere between 6 and 12 lines is the tipping point to move to a trunking solution. Did you know that there’s another good choice if you are using 6 outside lines or less? It’s SIP Trunking. With a SIP Trunk, your provider gives you both telephone lines and broadband Internet service over the same trunk. This isn’t like the issues you see with broadband phone because the telephone and Internet packets are kept from interfering. The way it works is that voice packets have priority at all times. Any bandwidth not needed for phone calls is automatically reassigned to the broadband pool.

Multiple business locations present their own challenges. Many companies start hooking up private lines from headquarters to satellite offices only to find after a few years that they have a slew of lines and an enormous bandwidth bill. Now would be a good time to re-evaluate. A MPLS network can likely replace that rat’s nest of dedicated point to point lines for a lot less cost, while protecting your security and providing new options like mesh any-to-any networking.

Here are two critical point to remember. In the last few years, prices have gone down and options have gone up. Both of those work in your favor. Why not let them? Get new bandwidth options and pricing quotes now.

The Green Way To Get Documents Signed

We’re drowning in a sea of business paper. All that talk about computers creating the paperless office was 180 degrees out of phase with what really happened. As soon as there were high speed printers, business users started printing at high speed. This went on for decades, culminating in the rise of the professional business document shredder. They come by your office with a van full of high power slicing and dicing equipment and shovel the paper in like tree branches going into a chipper shredder. Is there any way to break this costly cycle of buying more paper so you can print more documents and then shred them to make more paper? There is, and you can thank your lucky cloud for it.


It’s cloud services that are finally starting to break the paper cycle. Clouds are nebulous things, so to speak. There is no hardware for you to deal with. You just access those clouds from your iPad, smartphone, desktop or notebook computer and accomplish what you had in mind. While on the go, you probably aren’t anywhere near a printer anyway. That means the business processes you use to get your job done have to be designed to work without paper.

This puts us in the interesting dilemma of half the people being fully interconnected online with the rest in a limbo state of half-online and half-offline. Many businesses and organizations still need those offline products like signed paper documents to copy, mail and file. Are you really going to trust email messages for your non-disclosure agreements, W9 tax forms, purchase orders or employment agreements? If it needs to pass a legal sniff test, a tweet, text message or an email just won’t do.

Fortunately, all is not lost. You may not be able to use casual online communication methods to support legally binding documents, but there is an electronic technology that does just that. Just in time, too, because business, government, health care and other serious endeavors are about to go paperless in a big way. The process is called electronic signature.

Electronic signature isn’t brand new. It’s just coming into the limelight with a recent stampede toward mobile computing and productivity oriented cost reductions. It supersedes makeshift solutions such as faxing (still paper intensive) and scanning paper documents so you can email them and have them printed off again at the far end. Electronic signature is a purely electronic system that doesn’t assume there is any actual paperwork to begin with.

RightSignature is a company in the forefront of this technology. What they’ve created is a way for e-signatures to replicate pen-and-paper signing when using a mouse and browser. The electronic documents then include handwritten biometric signatures that are legally binding. They are compliant with the E-Sign Act, UETA Act and European Directive that all establish the validity and legality of electronic signatures worldwide.

Getting a document signed is as simple as uploading a PDF or Word File to the RightSignature system, entering the required signers’ names and emails, and clicking send. RightSignature then contacts the signers by email to tell them how to access the online documents and sign them. When complete, all parties are notified and get electronic copies of the signed documents, plus a copy is archived.

It’s very similar to what you accomplish now, but without the flurry of copying, the cost of overnight mail, nor the interminable wait for physical documents to be delivered, signed and sent back. It’s estimated that the cost of processing a signed document can drop by more than an order of magnitude using the electronic signature process.

Would you like to give it a try? If you are a business or organization that needs to send out documents for signature, you can have a 5 document free trial right now. No credit card is required. Only buy the service if you like the way it works. Get your RightSignature Electronic Signature Free Trial started and see if you really want to go back to drowning in all that paper.