Give Yourself Enough Time to Save on Telecom Costs

Everybody likes to save money. Anyone managing anything within a business makes it their mission to get the best deal possible for their company. Telecom cost savings? You bet! Who wouldn’t want the most service for the least money? You can have that, you know. There are really only two things you need to do. The first is knowing where to look. The second is allowing enough time to implement the optimum solution.

Knowing where to look has gotten real easy within the last decade. Instead of a half-hearted effort thumbing through the phone book and calling whoever you happen to find that looks appropriate, or working yourself into a frenzy trying to mine the Internet for potential vendors, all you have to do is contact a telecom broker who represents several dozen providers.

At least a few of these providers will have the right size solution for your needs and be serving your business location or locations. You get multiple competitive quotes and free consulting support, if you want it. Chances are good that you’ll be offered deals you never could have found on your own.

Who is this award winning telecom broker that makes your life easy? It’s Telarus, Inc. They invented, and patented, the GeoQuote (tm) telecom search engine that gives you instant online quotes for everything from telephone trunks to Gigabit Ethernet private line bandwidth. You can access the GeoQuote input form on our T1 Rex website, among others. Go ahead and give it a try. See if the results are better that whatever else you’re finding.

Now that you know where to look, you also need to know when to look. This is where a lot of business owners and managers go awry. The natural tendency is to wait until your current contract is almost up for renewal before looking at alternatives. It may be that you are unaware of the expiration date until somebody from that supplier calls you about renewing for another 1 to 3 years. It could be that someone from accounting put the renewal notification on your desk a month ago but it got lost in the shuffle. It might even be that you know it’s coming up but you’re just too busy to give it any attention. After all, you’re probably getting roughly the best deal anybody else would give you, right?

Wrong! The telecom industry has gotten incredibly competitive since deregulation was implemented decades ago. Time was when you could choose from your local telephone company or nobody to get analog or digital lines. Now there are dozens of competitors, large and small, each with their own service footprint and specialized offerings. A provider doesn’t have to be based in your area to serve your location. Many have installed equipment in local telco offices and lease whatever last mile connections they need to complete your circuit.

The other thing to be aware of is that new technology has multiplied the number of options available to meet your needs. You may have started your company with a few telephone lines and a DSL or T1 line, but now you should also be looking at Ethernet over Copper, MPLS networks for linking multiple locations, lower cost fiber optic connections, ISDN PRI or SIP digital trunks, and cloud hosted services.

Cloud services have become the most sought after solutions to many business needs because they give you the opportunity of paying per user per month rather than a flat monthly lease fee or having to invest in expensive on-premises equipment. Hosted VoIP telephone systems, Software as a Service, cloud storage, managed routers and virtualized servers are all fairly recent developments that could potentially save you a lot of money and meet your needs better than what you’ve been using all these years.

There are lots of exciting possibilities to consider, but you won’t be taking advantage of any of them if your contract runs out today and you have the choice of signing the renewal papers on your desk or going without telephone or Internet service. The time to start the savings process is well in advance. Allowing three months ahead of contract expiration is a good rule of thumb for many companies. This gives you time needed to make contact, get competitive offers, mull them over, ask questions, refine your needs, place an order and give the vendor time to install your new service. If you are looking to connect a lot of branch offices, run lines across international borders or get high bandwidth fiber that needs construction, you should at least be asking questions as soon as you know what you need.

Don’t be shy about asking the vendors to help you define your requirements or customize a solution that does everything you need. Some will come back with off the shelf offers, but there are quite a few today who are anxious to do whatever it takes to get your business. These companies have expert engineering teams who know their systems inside and out, and they have the technical savvy to make sure your network is capable of supporting the high performance bandwidth or latency sensitive voice services you are asking for. Some providers are quite happy to augment or even be your IT department if that’s what you need.

Does this discussion get you excited about looking into new possibilities or a little nervous that you are running out of time? Either way, the best thing you can do is check prices and request information on telecom services that meet your needs at the best prices in the industry.

Increase Bandwidth Without Increasing Costs

Bandwidth, especially WAN bandwidth, is in demand. Some companies treat it like a scarce resource. Why? Because bandwidth costs are expensive. While 100 Mbps or 1,000 Mbps might be considered modest bandwidth levels on a company LAN and readily affordable, as soon as you need to connect beyond your network edge the costs jump dramatically.

Here’s why that’s the case. Communications beyond the LAN have been traditionally handled by telecom service providers. In fact, these connections employ telco developed technology deployed originally for use exclusively by the telephone companies. Later, these line services were offered to businesses as computer networking and communication became popular.

In recent years, more companies have gotten into the metropolitan and wide area networking business. Most of the newest entrants have designed their core networks around the latest technologies to transport voice, video and data packets with quality of service controls. That’s not a knock on legacy suppliers, who have been transforming their networks from switched circuit to packing switching in line with the changing needs of the marketplace. However, it’s important to recognize that there is much more competition in this field than in decades past and much of it is coming from companies that don’t have huge legacy physical plants to support.

This gives you an idea on where to find immediate cost savings that you can pocket or use to upgrade your current bandwidth. If you bought your circuits years ago and simply renewed contracts as they came up or have been paying on a month to month basis, there’s a pretty good chance that you can get a better offer. How do you go about doing that? The hard way is to do a lot of looking for alternative providers and then put in lots more time making phone calls and negotiating various offers.

The easier way is to let a telecom broker, like Telarus, Inc., pull together a set of competitive quotes tailored to your business location or locations. That’s right, each location that needs service will require a separate quote process. It’s because most bandwidth services are location dependent based on facilities in place at or near that location. You may get one price, while another site across the highway may have a significantly different quote.

What ensures that you are getting the best deals you can is to have multiple carriers vying for your business and going through a large brokerage that can command the best rates from those carriers. You actually have more leverage going through a broker than winging it on your own. The broker’s commission comes out of the carrier’s sales budget, not added to your bill. If this makes sense to you, get a set of bandwidth quotes for your business needs and see what the potential savings are.

The other way to gain bandwidth at the same or lower cost than you are paying now is to switch technologies. A very popular migration right now is from traditional T1 lines to Ethernet over Copper. Both services are highly reliable, have symmetrical bandwidth that is the same for both upload and download, and are provisioned over ordinary twisted pair telco wiring that is usually already installed. The differences are available bandwidth and cost.

T1 lines run at 1.5 Mbps. You can double that to 3 Mbps by bonding two T1 lines together, but your costs double right along with the bandwidth. Ethernet over Copper offers 2 Mbps and 3 Mbps bandwidth service for about the same price as a single T1 line. This makes it easy for a company to double WAN bandwidth or dedicated Internet access without having to raise the telecom budget. In addition, EoC offers bandwidth levels of 10, 15, 20, 30 and even 50 Mbps in some areas. Bonded T1 tops out at around 10 to 12 Mbps with multiple T1 lines.

You can see that there are at least two good strategies to gaining more bandwidth without a corresponding cost increase. The first is to get competitive bids through a large telecom broker representing dozens of service providers. The second is to switch to a newer technology that offers lower costs for equivalent bandwidths. You can take advantage of both these strategies by requesting competitive quotes for available bandwidth services for one or more business locations.

How To Find Better Metro E Service Prices

Metro E or Metro Ethernet services are available in most cities. Businesses with a strong presence in a particular metropolitan area can use Metro E to good advantage in linking their various satellite offices, warehouses, factories, retail outlets and so on. The big issue is how can these companies be sure they are getting the best prices on the Metro Ethernet services they put on contract.

Metro Ethernet is a subset of the MAN or Metropolitan Area Network. Metro networks sprung up to address the needs of local businesses who didn’t necessarily need connections to other cities and states. What they really need is a way to connect from their headquarters location to their remotely located data center or backup data center miles away. Other connections are needed for branch offices and other operational locations.

This need for high performance, but local, network connections led to the rise of MAN operators. Like telcos or ISPs, they provide a set of services. In this case, it is most often access to a fiber optic ring that encircles the city and includes key suburbs, office and industrial parks. Last mile connections are provided from each business subscriber to the fiber ring. These can be fiber optic links or twisted pair copper connections depending on the bandwidth needed.

Most Metro networks were constructed using dual SONET rings with a working ring and a protection ring carrying traffic in opposite directions. Standard SONET ring protection offers an automatic failover within 50 mSec if the main ring fails for any reason. This self-healing capability improves the resiliency of SONET fiber optic networks to survive equipment failures and severed lines called “backhoe fade.”

SONET services include OC3, OC12 and OC48 telecom services. DS3 is also often available multiplexed on OC3 services. One issue with SONET is that the service levels aren’t very granular. There a big step, for instance, between OC3 at 155 Mbps and OC12 and 622 Mbps.

Metro Ethernet, also called Carrier Ethernet, addresses many of the limitations of legacy SONET services. Metro E may be provided as a service on SONET networks called Ethernet over SONET. This way the underlying network can be kept in place avoiding large construction costs. Some newer metropolitan networks are IP based to begin with. They offer Ethernet services by default.

One issue is ease of interfacing with the MAN. Ethernet is the standard protocol of company LANs. With an Ethernet connection to the MAN, you simply plug an Ethernet patch cord, fiber or copper, between your network edge router and the carrier’s demarcation connection. SONET requires a special interface card to do the protocol conversion between Ethernet, a network protocol, and SONET, a telecommunications protocol. SONET interfaces are unique OC3, OC12, OC48 and so on. Ethernet interfaces are ports with maximum speeds. A typical Ethernet port is 100 Mbps, 1000 Mbps or 10 Gbps. These support any network speed up to the maximum the installed port can handle. This make it easy for service providers to offer an almost infinite selection of bandwidths to their customers.

Since everything stays in the Ethernet protocol end to end, Metro E can be used to bridge multiple company LANs in the metro area. This is called Ethernet LAN service or E-LAN. You can also get point to point private line connections called Ethernet Line service or E-Line.

Metro E also addresses another limitation of SONET, which is historically high costs. Ethernet services of similar bandwidth are often half the price of their SONET equivalent. Extensive scalability also means that companies can select a bandwidth level closer to what they actually need instead of being cramped for speed or having to order way more than can be practically put to use.

How can you be sure that you are getting the best Metro Ethernet or even SONET MAN service prices? The best way is to work through a bandwidth broker that represents dozens of top tier service providers. Not only do you save time with one-stop shopping, but it is likely that you’ll get quotes from competitive carriers that you may not even be aware of.

Are you currently using metropolitan area network services or have a new requirement for metro bandwidth? If so, get prices and availability of Metro E and SONET network services from providers that serve your business locations.



Note: Photograph of Pittsburgh skyline part of a panorama courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Copper Ethernet Line Prices Instantly!

You’re no doubt aware that Ethernet over Copper is making a strong challenge to be the bandwidth service of choice for businesses. How much of a challenge? The bandwidth increases and cost reductions are making it hard to choose anything else if EoC is available. Just how much can you get and for what price reduction? Why not check Ethernet over Copper prices instantly!



Through the magic of the Telarus GeoQuote automated pricing system, it’s now possible to get Ethernet quotes immediately any time you want. Simply use the handy input form you’ll find at CopperEthernet.com and you’ll be automatically set up to get Ethernet over Copper pricing.

How accurate are these prices? They could be considered budgetary pricing, although they are quite accurate. GeoQuote mimics the same procedures that carriers use to make service price quotes. If you go directly to a carrier, however, you’ll probably have to wait a few days or more to get the results back. You’ll also be limited to one provider's offers. Why settle for one quote when you can get several or more to compare?

Telarus is an award winning telecom and network services broker that has agreements with dozens of service providers. You get the same or better pricing through the GeoQuote system as you could by spending hours on the phone calling around for competitive quotes.

It is well worth your while to talk to a Telarus bandwidth consultant, as there are often short term special deals available that don’t show up in the automated results. Your consultant can let you know what’s on “sale” so you can make the best buying decision. At the end of the quote process, you’ll have the option to call Telarus toll free for further discussion or just click a link and a consultant will call you promptly.

You should also know that Ethernet over Copper isn’t the only service that’s available for instant price quotes. If you wish, you can explore options for T1 and bonded T1 lines, business Cable broadband, fixed wireless broadband, Satellite bandwidth, fractional and full DS3 services and Ethernet over Fiber. Yes, quotes are available for fiber optic services from 10 to 1000 Mbps using the same instant pricing process.

Are you anxious to see how much you could be saving over your current telecom services contract? Take just a minute from your busy day and get Copper Ethernet line prices instantly. After you see the results, you’ll probably want to take a few more minutes and call in an order.

Making The Move For Higher Bandwidth

Is your organization bandwidth frustrated? With online technology moving as fast as it has been, many organizations find that the bandwidth they need exceeds the bandwidth they have. Ok, no problem. Just call up your service provider and tell them to crank up the line speed. Oh, no. They say you have all the speed you can get. Now what?

Have you considered moving? The sad truth is that bandwidth availability and pricing are highly location dependent. Some locations offer a wealth of options and low prices. Others may not even be able to support your basic needs no matter how much you are willing to spend.

There are two ways to move. You can relocate physically or you can relocate virtually. Between the two, you should find an acceptable solution.

Physical relocation is what it says. You pack up and move to another building. If you’ve been thinking of doing this anyway because you’ve run out of space or the rent has gotten to high, or you’d like to be closer to your customer base or suppliers, then lack of bandwidth could be the impetus that gets you going.

Don’t just blindly pick a spot based without checking out broadband availability first. You may be in for a rude shock. Sometimes service is available across the street, but not where you are. It’s hard to tell by looking, at least from the outside. You might talk to other tenants if you’ll have neighbors in the facility. See what they have for telephone and connectivity. Tenants of the buildings next to your pick should also be close enough to give you an idea if the bandwidth you want is available.

The best way to know for sure is to get competitive quotes from a telecom broker. Generally you need an address and telephone number for that address to get accurate quotes. Your consultants can work with you on getting something close enough to ensure you won’t be disappointed when you actually order service.

What if you can’t move or really don’t want to? In that case, a virtual move may be in order. Keep your offices and staff in place. What you’ll be moving is your servers and any appliances that need high bandwidth connections. Where will you be going? To a colocation center, of course. A colo, or carrier hotel, is a facility that provides rack space, power, cooling, and bandwidth for many clients. The cost of bringing bandwidth to your particular equipment is trivial because the service providers are also present in the colo facility. It’s usually just a matter of a wire or fiber line to another room. You can relocate the equipment you have now or sometimes rent servers that the colo technical staff maintain.

Are you ready to make the move for higher bandwidth? Before you make any commitments, be sure to talk with a Telarus expert consultant. You’ll get options, recommendations and prices on what services are available at your candidate destinations.

How Telarus GeoScan Finds Better Network Deals

The nation’s premier telecom brokerage service, Telarus, Inc., is introducing an advanced telecom carrier research tool to its family of proprietary software-based services. The new GeoScan enables Telarus consultants to better search and refine carrier service offerings for clients. By making the search and evaluation process more sophisticated, Telarus agents can ferret out the closest matching offers for a particular set of applications.

Why is such a tool needed? After all, the patented GeoQuote process already leads the industry in its ability to find and organize dozens of competing services from a plethora of carriers. What’s happened is an embarrassment of riches for Telarus. As the company’s reputation has grown in the industry, more and more carriers have requested to be included in the Telarus search results. On top of that, the telecom industry itself is undergoing a major transformation from switched circuit services to packet switched networks worldwide.

Within the last few years, the venerable T1 line, DS3 connection, and SONET/SDH fiber optic carriers have been challenged by Metro Ethernet services with scalable bandwidths from 3 Mbps through 10 Gbps. Include SIP trunking, wireless last mile links, and MPLS networks and you have an order of magnitude, at least, multiplication in the variety of service offerings available to businesses and organizations. It’s a deluge of options that can easily overwhelm the time-honored quote methods used by most telecom agents.

Telarus saw this coming when they refined their GeoQuote system to electronically connect with carrier databases and then assemble a list of appropriate quotes instantly. But a database connection can deliver a fire hose stream of data that’s hard to analyze at a glance for the best opportunities. That’s where the value of GeoScan shines. With this additional tool, Telarus agents can specify parameters such as the max MRC per location, the type of product and term for each circuit. That allows them to mine the data to find the particular service deals that are exact matches to a customer’s requirements.

Today’s business environment is more highly focused on productivity than ever before. That’s resulting in more sophisticated computer processes linking an ever increasing number of physical locations including overseas offices and factories. To keep up, telecom service providers have to step up their own processes to quickly analyze a prospective customer's needs and generate accurate quotes. They also need to be able to rapidly modify options to try “what ifs” and deal with a customer’s dynamically changing requirements.

This is where Telarus shines as the next generation of telecom brokers. They have the tools to tackle large and complex situations and the carrier relationships to offer the best-fit solutions available. This process scales from small businesses such as insurance or real estate offices up through major medical centers and Fortune 500 companies. The tools and the consultants can service any serious business opportunity that comes their way.

Could your company benefit from a complementary review of your voice, data and video networking needs? It’s free, of course, and you’ll likely be surprised by the variety of service options that you didn’t even know exist. Why not give it a try? Take just a minute and tell Telarus about your applications. It will be well worth your while.

The Gift of Bandwidth For Administrative Professionals

This week is Administrative Professionals Week. It’s a time to honor those “Radar O’Rilleys” of the office who keep everything running smoothly so management and staff can concentrate on getting their own jobs done. You’ve no doubt signed a nice greeting card and perhaps taken your secretary, administrative assistance, receptionist or other admin. support pro to lunch... Haven’t you? If not, better scramble and do something nice quickly. You have no idea how much doo-doo you could be in on Monday.

After the hoopla ebbs, there is something that still needs attention. Besides a little fawning and personal kudos, what administrative professionals could really use is better tools to help them be more productive. I’ve dealt with many great administrative assistants over the years and can attest that they are models of efficiency. They’ll take whatever’s available and make it work magic. But think how much more would get done if the tools worked better.

One big bottleneck in any business can be the WAN bandwidth connection. That includes point to point lines linking your business locations, and broadband Internet service. When the network slows down, everybody slows down. Those high performance admins that burn through a keyboard a week wind up drumming their fingers on the desk while waiting for critical files to transfer. Does that sound like a wise use of resources to you?

I’m going to make a suggestion here. Why not take about a minute or so and ask your administrative assistants if they are being slowed down by the performance of your computer network, especially for outside files. If the answer comes back “yes,” you probably can’t make a better investment than increasing that bandwidth.

That can be easier and cheaper than you imagine. Just ask your assistant or IT manager to run a quick bandwidth pricing check through a telecom broker. It can be done online in almost no time. All you need to know is the address of the business, who should be contacted and how much bandwidth you have in mind. Start with double what you have now and see what the results are. You might be shocked to find that you could have a lot faster network service for the same money as you are paying now. Wouldn’t it be a shame to let that opportunity go to waste?

Pssst. If you are one of those hard-charging administrative assistants being limited by data connections that are way too sloooowww, why not take charge and make this happen. When you tell your boss that you could get a lot more done with a faster network connection, also mention that you can take care of researching this without distracting from your critical work. Then get an instant online quote for bandwidth services and print off the results. Good chance the boss will say: “Go ahead and order that.” Then you’ll have one really sweet gift for Administrative Professionals Week.

Use a Telecom Broker Before You Go Broker

Where do you buy your telecom line services? From the local phone company? From a carrier sales executive? OK, then. How do you know you're getting the best deal? After all, every one of them will smile at you and tell you what a good deal you're getting. But without a list of competitive quotes to compare, who's to say if you're getting a good deal, great deal, so-so deal, or taken to the cleaners?

Great. So who's got time to chase down a dozen competitive service providers and get quotes out of them? Who can even find these people? I'll tell you who. A telecom broker, that's who!

You may have never heard of a telecom broker but you'll probably benefit from using one. The role of the telecom broker is to do the leg work that you don't have time for. These people are experts in the telecommunications industry but not employed by any of the service providers. They are independent business people who guard their independence so that they can present their clients with unbiased listings of the best deals.

Think independent insurance agent. The relationship is similar. An independent agent, in this case called a master agency, is a representative of a particular company and licensed to sell their services. They would be just another sales representative except that the independent agent has relationships with many companies. That way they are not bound to present only a single offer. They can show you as many offers as are available for your particular business location.

That sure sounds good, but how much are you going to have to fork over to get these multiple offers. Not a penny. You do not pay for the services of the telecom broker. Their fees are paid by the carriers. Most carriers are happy to do this because they only have to shell out a commission fee when the broker sells one of their services. It's strictly pay for results.

A telecom broker has the latitude to act as a free consultant to your business. You don't even need to know the industry terminology for the service you need. Simply describe what you are trying to accomplish and with what equipment. The broker will scour the available offerings and help you pick the one that gives you the most performance for the least amount of money. Brokers are also aware of new services just on the market and any limited time discounts that happen to be in place.

It's all win and no lose for you, the business manager or owner. You get free help in selecting and ordering the telecom services you need, and at a better price than you can probably find yourself. You'll also have another place to go for support in case your needs change or on the odd chance you have trouble with your service.

So, how do you find such a broker? Arguably the best in the business is Telarus, Inc. They have an extensive group of expert consultants available, with phone coverage 24/7 and easy online inquiries. You'll be able to access them quickly and easily through our T1 Rex GeoQuote(tm) service provided by Telarus. Let them be of assistance right now. Yes, right now!