I seem to find myself answering questions about who the “best” telecom carrier is.  My answer is usually something like…..”best at what?”  The real answer is that they are all good AND they are all bad at certain things.  Obviously, people are asking me this question because they want to know who the best carrier is for their business.  The answer to that question depends on specifics to their situation such as the ones listed below.
1)  Address  – I say “address” and not “location” on purpose.  The exact address of a business can mean a world of difference in terms of what services they can get from whom and for how much.  Even with a company as large as AT&T, there are certain addresses where customers still cannot get a PRI.  Or, even if they can get it, they may have to pay double for it because it is served out of a remote terminal.  Whereas other companies may offer a PRI at that location a their standard prices.  On the other hand, if you are located in an area that AT&T is targeting for one reason or another, you may be able to get PRI service at half the price of their competitors.  This is one example but there are many others that your address determines such as:

• availability of DSL or Cable for Internet.
• availability of an Integrated T-1.
• availability of Fiber
• availability of Ethernet over Copper
• …..and much much more.

2)  Size – When I say size, I am not referring to the size of your building but rather the size of your usage.  The questions of how many phone lines you need, how much long distance and inbound toll-free you use and how you use the Internet need to be answered to determine who the best carrier for you may be.  Each company (carrier) has different strengths and pricing structures so all of those questions need to be answered.  Some providers offer products that are ideal for smaller businesses with less than 6 phone lines at a location.  The vast majority of businesses fall into this category.  A significantly smaller number of businesses require between 6 and 15 phone lines but there are typically many more options for businesses that are this size for various reasons.  Ironically, some of the companies who are competitive to the big carriers like AT&T have products that are very competitive, if not better than what AT&T has to offer.  There are many reasons for this but the lesson is that size is a factor in who the best carrier may be for you.
3)  Who  – I could write multiple posts about this category…..and I probably will some day.  But for the sake of space, I’ll just say that “who” writes the order will absolutely have an effect on your probability of success.
4)  Preferences –  Some people prefer a large company like AT&T.  They believe that with all of their resources, they will be better able to provide service.  Others believe that a smaller company will care more about them and provide more personalized service.  The reality is that they are both right and wrong at the same time.  I could tell horror stories about every company you would think about doing business with and I could tell wonderful stories about each company as well.
There are certainly other factors that go into choosing the right provider and the right carrier.  So, what’s the point of this post?  I guess it’s the same as my other posts; to provide valuable information to business owners and senior management.  I think the real point is that there is no one company whom I believe is the “best”.  Your individual circumstances will dictate what your best option is.  My advice is the same as it always is; find someone you trust who knows the marketplace and has a vested interest in your success…….. and trust their advice.  

I think that part of the job of a senior executive is to foresee the risks that you can do something about……..and do something about it.  You may never get the credit you deserve for championing a cause like this.  But you will look like the smartest person in the room when a disaster strikes and you’ve already planned for it.  Your boss or your shareholders will wonder what other things you’ve planned for that they haven’t thought of………..making you INVALUBLE to the company.  Take three minutes to read this post, I think it will be worth your time.

Hosted VoIP is a service offering whereby your phone system would be owned by the hosting company and sit in a secure data center, accessible to you by dedicated T-1, the Internet or one of many different types of private data networks.  I must admit, I am surprised at how many companies I talk to about hosted VoIP who quickly dismiss it because of the pricing structure.  I am not an accountant but I did earn a finance degree from the University of Akron.  During that time, we extensively studied concepts like Return on Investment and payback period for an investment, along with numerous other ways to analyze a potential investment.  To me, it doesn’t take much analysis to determine that Hosted VoIP solves some of the age old telecommunications problems that have faced owners and senior managers for years.  Problems that one cannot be blamed for not solving in the past because hosted VoIP had not been invented.  I’m not talking about features or call quality, what I am talking about is fault tolerance and disaster avoidance.  Without fail, every executive I talk to about their voice and data services informs me that those services are ‘the lifeblood of their business’.  They tell me that they are losing thousands of dollars per hour when their customers try to call them and receive a busy signal or a “temporarily out of service” message.  Why then, are they so reluctant to invest relatively few dollars per month to protect themselves from 80%-90% of the events that can cause this to happen? 

One reason is that many of those decisions NOT to move forward are made behind closed doors without input from their trusted adviser.  Their trusted adviser will remind them of all of the disasters that can occur to take their voice and/or data services down.  And worse, they will have little or no control over when those services will be restored.  Their only recourse is to drop everything else on their schedule and frantically call their provider and yell, beg and threaten lawsuits if their services aren’t restored ASAP.  Hopefully at that point, the decision makers will realize that a small monthly premium is more than worth potential for loss.

It may cost an extra 20% per month to use a hosted VoIP company compared to your current telecom expense.  But it’s not just extra cost.  There are some tangible, justifiable elements that go into the pricing.  For instance, they are typically located in a secure data center with backup batteries and diesel powered generators, dual entrance for electricity and telecom services, multiple phone carriers possibly delivered via fiber optics (as opposed to copper), state of the art fire suppression and temperature control, power regulation equipment and 24/7 monitoring.  These data centers typically cost more than a million dollars to build and obviously there is a maintenance cost.  To pay an extra 20% for this type of protection seems small to me. 

Of course, there are events that can occur that would cause YOUR access to this facility to be compromised.  Events that effect your building such as a T-1 outage, power outage, or disaster such as flooding, fire or many other things.  But in a hosted VoIP environment, your ability to re-route your phone lines YOURSELF to a secondary location is simple and totally within your control.  That secondary location can be another facility of yours or in extreme cases you can route calls to your employess’ cell phones of home office.  In the case of a fire or flood that would cause you to vacate your building for an extended period, it would be easy to semi-permanently re-route calls to a temporary facility.  Best of all, if one of these events were to happen, you wouldn’t lose one call; your customers would at least be able to reach your voice mail which is safely tucked away inside your secure data center…..retrievable via any working phone.  Can you duplicate this redundancy for the cost?  If you lost just one order or potential customer during a prolonged outage, how easy would it be to justify the extra 20% to 30% that hosted VoIP may cost you?

In addition to the redundancy and fault tolerance, keep in mind that you do not have to buy or maintain a phone system.  The initial cost of the phone system is just the beginning of what you will pay.   Make sure to factor in the maintenance contract that you won’t have now, upgrades and the MAC’s (moves, adds and changes) that will cost you a minimum of $50 just to move a persons office from one place to another or add a new employee. 

As if the previous advantages weren’t enough, another advantage to a hosted VoIP system is the ability to operate multiple locations as one.  Regardles of the city, state or country, you can have all of your existing phone numbers ring to one central office to easily be transferred the appropriate department or extention.  This will allow for a reduced load on the support staff at smaller facilities, better coverage for your busy season, vacation or illness.  It would even allow you to bring all of your attendants to the same facility where three people may be able to do the work of five.  How you re-deploy your other two persons is up to you but here are a few questions to consider.  Is your customer service department overworked?  Has your personnel budget been cut?  Have you lost employees that you haven’t been able to replace?   You get the picture.  If you calculate the cost of just one employee with taxes and benefits wouldn’t it be simple to justify an extra 20% or 30% on your voice and data services? 

​I want to re-iterate that you cannot eliminate 100% of the scenario’s that may cause you to lose your voice or data services.  But if you can eliminate 90% of them, you are doing everything you can reasonably do to protect yourself.   Most companies that I deal with wait until AFTER a disaster strikes before they do something to protect themselves.  ​

It occured to me to write a list of things I’ve learned about the telecommunications industry this year.  I don’t know how many items I will ultimately come up with but I suspect that the list will be a combination of common sense items and realizations along with confirmations of certain principles.  This list is not in any particular order.
1.  The big phone companies are going to get their money – My company is a distributer for one of the biggest phone companies in the world.  I’ve seen a methodical approach to locking customers into auto-renewable increasingly expensive agreements.  For all of the great deals these customers received two or three years ago, the phone company is getting their money back and then some.  And it’s hard to stop……even for us.
2.  Do not use the Internet for your primary phone usage – This is common sense.  The Internet is uncontrollable and can get clogged up at times.  There is nothing more frustrating than trying to have a phone conversation when there is choppiness, delays and digital garbling.  Avoid the Internet if possible.  The only qualification I will add to this is that if you are working from home and have a broadband connection to connect back to the corporate, non-Internet, VoIP platform……it can make sense.
3.  All telecom companies are GOOD and BAD at the same time – I haven’t figured out the most elegant way to say this yet.  But I have had various problems with every telecom provider I have ever dealt with AND I have had great experiences with every one of them.  What does that mean?  I’m not sure.  But I can say that each company has its strengths and weaknesses and I believe that, as in most things, it boils down to PEOPLE.  Each company has people who are GOOD at their job and take it seriously and each company has employees who are BAD at their job.  If you want to know how to make sure you get the GOOD people each time, work with a salesperson or distributor who has plenty of experience in the industry and who has a vested interest in your long term success; they know how to get things done.
4.   Best quote I’ve read in a while – “The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see” – Ayn Rand, gleened from the AOMTP ’07 Comference Brief.  This quote could apply to many situations but I can identify with it in my industry.  Often times there is nothing that can be “explained” because the person has chosen not to see the problem.
5.  Michael Jackson is trying to become the woman in this Picasso Painting  – I know this is not telecom related but I discovered it this year nonetheless.  Can you deny the resemblance?  And the name Jacqueline………..Jackson (Jacko).  Spooky!
   
6.  The telecom industry will drive you to nuttiness  – As evidenced by number five.
7.  The people at the FCC need to work in this industry before they start calling the shots  – Seriously, anyone who has worked in this industry for more than a day realizes how many goofy rules are in place that do nothing but make it almost impossible for a company to successfully manage their telecommunications services.  I’ll save the details for another post but it is obvious to me that those who are calling the shots are not in the best position to make decisions that they think are in the best interest of the end user.
Happy New Year!!

I think I am tired of the concept of comparing apples to apples.  I think it is a lazy way for people to presume that they are eliminating all variables so that they can simply choose the lowest price.  In my position, I am often asked to compare the proposals from several companies “apples to apples”.   I finally decided that there is no such thing.

Let’s talk about a simple product like Internet access.  Presumably, with Internet access one would only need to look at bandwidth to compare two companies.  There are three standard types of high speed Internet acess; DSL, Cable and T-1.  But those three products are delivered so differently that it is impossible to choose one over the other based solely on bandwitdh.  For instance, a T-1 to the Internet is considered the gold standard but it only delivers a maximum of 1.544 MBps for one T-1.  There are cable companies that claim to deliver up to 15 MBps, 15 times more bandwidth, for only about twice as much money.  So why doesn’t every company just purchase the cable Internet and forget about T-1?  Because those of us who have been around the industry know instinctively that a T-1 is still the best bet for reliable, efficient delivery of high speed Internet. 

Are there situations where cable is the best choice for a company?  Yes. 
Are there situations where DSL is the best choice for a company?  Yes.
Are there situations where T-1 is the best choice for a company?  Yes.

So if you can’t whittle down your choice based on price, how do you make these important decisions?  The answer is simple.  1)  Find a trusted advisor who is knowledgable and experienced in the telecommunications industry.  2)  Make sure to tell him or her everything about your current situation and your plans.  3)  Let your trusted advisor make a recommendation based on their research and knowledge of the industry.  4)  Trust your gut and run with it. 

Think of a subject in which you feel very knowledgeable.  You may be thinking of your own industry, a hobby or a subject that you have studied extensively.  Ask yourself, do you not feel that you could make a better decision about this subject than a novice, even with the most complete spreadsheet?  Don’t you feel that the right answer is obvious sometimes, regardless of the seemingly insignificant differences to the “bottom line” when trying to use some objective criteria? 

​If you were at the grocery store trying to decide between the “red delicious” and “granny smith” and the produce manager happened to walk up behind you and say “this batch of red delicious is particularly juicy and tasty”, would your decision NOT be made at that very moment, regardless of the price? 

I’ve been wanting to write about the difference between DSL and Cable for Internet access for awhile.  This post is a general overview of the differences between the two.  In particular, I want to discuss the potential differences in speed. 

First, I want to acknowledge that I prefer DSL but I am not against Cable.  In fact, there are many locations where only one or the other is available.  I generally make the statement that cable and DSL are similar but there are some differences.

It is useful to understand the difference in architecture between the two technologies.  DSL is a private service which is delivered over a traditional phone line.  The maximum speed of DSL service is determined by the distance of the endpoint from the phone company’s central office or remote terminal.  It is also affected by the quality of the copper wire.  The good thing about DSL is that once you have service established, it tends to provide VERY consistent bandwidth. 

Cable is sort of a community service which is delivered over the same network as cable television.  By community service I mean that everybody in the same “neighborhood” are sharing the same bandwitdth.  The bandwidth may start at a higher speed but depending on the usage of your nieghbors, the availability to you may be greater or lesser at any given time.  So it’s true to say that cable will give you a higher maximum speed but it also tends to give you a slower minimum speed.

Ask anyone who has used cable Internet service and they will tell you that the performance fluctuates throughout the day.  Normally the speed takes a hit at around 3:00 PM when the kids come home from school and between 7 and 10 PM when most people do their Internet browsing.  With cable, you will get your fastest speeds at 3:00 AM when most people are sleeping.  In case you were wondering, yes….businesses and residents share the same bandwidth.  You don’t think the cable company has run an entirely separate network of cable just for businesses do you?

Once you reach the Central Office of the phone company or the cable company, you are then routed to “The Internet”.  At this point, you are technically “sharing” your bandwidth with everyone served from that central office including T-1 customers.  My experience is that any bottlenecks occur between your business and the central office. So, when you see a commercial about how DSL is slow and Cable is blazing fast, you will now understand that they aren’t technically lying…….but they aren’t being truthful either.

So that brings me back to the title of this post.  I don’t know which car is faster but I do know that if you are on the highway with a bunch of other cars your maximum speed will be affected.  But if you have your own private highway to your destination, you will get there faster even if your car is slower.  And that’s what we really care about when we are talking about driving OR browsing isn’t it?

​PS – now you understand why you don’t want to rely on cable to provide you with access for VoIP. 

In my previous 2 posts I discussed developing a backup plan in case of a telecommunications outage.  Depending on the structure of your company, there are different ways to set-up your backup plan.  I discussed the traditional strategies for a company with only one location.  During this post, I will probe the opportunities that exist for companies with multiple locations.
In this case, I am assuming that your preference is to have location number two receive calls for location number one in the event of an outage and vice versa.  The solution is pretty simple.  Its similar to what you would do with backup pots lines in that you would forward your main number to the other locations main number. 
There are a few keys to successfully implementing this plan.  First, as with all backup plans, it needs to be in writing.  There should be a one page instruction sheet that lists the step by step process for forwarding your phone numbers AND un-forwarding them.  If you have more than one published phone number, be sure to include those numbers. Second, the steps should be practiced and tested prior to an emergency.  You may want to consider asking the person responsible for implementing it to test it every three months as part of his/her job duties.  Part of the test should be to make MULTIPLE calls to the phone number you are testing.  You want to make sure that you can receive multiple calls at the same time because some carriers only provide one call path when forwarding your numbers. 
Once you know that the forwarding plan will work, you want to make sure the backup party knows how to receive those calls and what to do with them.  They may have to take a written message.   Or you could set up a general voice mail box where the message desribes that if they are leaving a message there, it means that “there is a serious phone outage but that you are aware of it and all message will be responded to quickly”.  You have to make the judgement as to the volume of calls and the patience of your callers to determine if this is a good option for you.  Then someone would have to check the mailbox and take appropriate action.  Another alternative is to have the person receiving the calls “transfer” calls to the party’s cell phone.  This would require that the person has a handy list of cell phone numbers.  It would also require that your phone system can transfer a live call to an outside number.  You can also get this service from most phone companies but you would definitely want to ask them to activate the feature and provide instructions on its use……..and practice it.  If you can get this service from your phone company, I would recommend going that route as opposed to using your phone system because my experience tells me that the quality of the transferred call is much better when done by the phone company. 
This process may sound complicated but the alternative is to have your callers receive a “this line is temporarily out of service” message.   As I have stated before, every company who is out of service tells me that they are losing thousands of dollars per hour because of all of the business they are losing.  It’s not quite as complicated as it seems once it is practiced a few times.
Another way to transfer calls to a different location revolves around using VoIP or some other modern technologies to forward your phone calls.  Some phone companies will allow you to set-up a forwarding plan in the event of a T-1 outage.  This plan will automatically go into effect if there is a T-1 outage and can be very comforting to know that it is in place.  Some companies will charge a nominal fee for this service and others won’t.    Other phone companies will allow you to set-up a pre-determined re-routing plan that you would activate in the case of an outage.  There are pro’s and con’s to this service but the main advantage to this option is that you can activate it in any circumstance, particularly the situations that may not be automated with the aforementioned automated plan.  Also, there are companies that allow you to login to an online portal that gives you the power to re-route your calls at any time.  Obviously, you would need Internet access but in the worst case scenario you can have someone access the Internet from home, a second office or even with a wireless cellular plan. 
If you are using a hosted VoIP service, you may be able to have all three of these options available to you.  One of the main advantages of hosted VoIP is the ability operate almost seamlessly in the event of an outage at one of your sites.  I won’t spell out the details here because there are too many but this is one of the reasons I am strongly in favor of PROPERLY DESIGNED hosted VoIP for companies with multiple locations. 
My next post in this series will discuss some other ways to set up your backup plan for companies who are larger and/or operate a call center and cannot afford to be out of service for any period of time.  If you have any questions about setting up a backup plan for your company, I can be reached at dante@briskconsulting.com.

At least two or three times per week I receive a call from a customer or colleague in a total panic because their phone lines are down.  They remind me that they are losing thousands of dollars per minute because their “phone lines are their lifeblood” and I couldn’t agree more with those customers.  There is not one successful business that I know of who doesn’t use phone services for one reason or another to generate business or provide service to their customers.  Is there any other product or service that you can think of that you can say the same thing about?  But when I ask them what their backup plan is when their lines do go down, often times they don’t have one or they didn’t follow through on it.  This post is going to be the first a series of some of the most popular types of backup plans and some creative ones that will fit in your budget. 

​Before I get into the details I want to point our that since every business is different, the right type of backup plan will vary from business to business.  This is pretty much true for everything related to telecom.  Your size, number of locations, type of phone system and more will determine what the most economical backup plan should be.
Regardless of the backup plan, there are certian elements that must be present for a backup plan to have any merit.  First, the plan should provide some true redundancy.  In other words, the backup plan should have a reasonable chance of actually working in the event of an outage.  Second, the plan needs to be documented.  If there is an outage, the only way the plan will actually get executed is if it’s documented in a place that someone knows where it is.  Third, somebody needs to be responsible for executing the backup plan.  This means there probably needs to be at least two people (a primary and a backup) who know the plan and have the ability to execute it.  Lastly, the backup plan needs to be practiced occasionally to make sure it is current.  As long as these elements are present, you are ready to figure out what your best backup plan should be.

In my next post, which will be available in a few days, I will begin to explore one of the many differnt types of bakup plans that your company can implement.

For those senior executives and business owners reading this, you may have found yourself asking why the amount you pay for your telecom services doesn’t match what you were quoted by the sales representative.   The short answer to the question is that carriers play games with the pricing and if you don’t know the right questions to ask you could pay 20% to 40% more than you thought you were.   It can be frustrating and it can make you look bad to the person you report to if the company has to write a check for more than expected.  Or if you are the owner, it is literally money taken right out of your pocket.  As an agent for quite a few companies, I have a pretty good idea what their tricks are.  Over my next few posts I will give you my insights on some of these tricks and what you can do about them. 

Trick #1 – When you are asking for a quote, you should ask them to itemize the quote, including surcharges.  Every carrier adds surcharges to their invoice and it is considered a common practice in the industry.  But the salesperson is responsible for providing you accurate information about what you should expect to pay.  In my opinion it is not a valid excuse not to inform the customer of charges they will incur, even if they are called “surcharges” instead of something related to the service you are receiving.  It’s the same concept as when you book a hotel room and you find out there is some additional surcharge that you weren’t aware of.  Or when you buy new tires and they try to charge you a “disposal fee”.  As long as they are up-front about the costs, you can make an educated decision.  But if they spring them on you at checkout or when you pay the bill, it’s unacceptable in my opinion. 
The truth about surcharges is that they stay in the pockets of the carriers.  It would be the same as a fast food restaurant charging you a “register fee” on top of the cost of the burger and explaining that is it to cover the cost of the person running the cash register.  Don’t we all assume that the cost of the product includes the overhead?  Not in the telecommunications world.  Some examples of the surcharges you may experience are:

• Federal Access Charge – just because it has the word Federal in it doesn’t mean it is a tax.  It means that the Federal Government allows it.  How nice!
• Federal Universal Service Fund – usually a percentage of the cost of the services.  This money goes to pay for free services for others.  
• PICC – “Primary Interexchange Carrier Charge”.  This was developed when the local and long distance carrier were different and goes into the pocket of the long distance carrier…..who is typically the same as the local carrier these days.  You can read it as “Profit In Carriers Coffers”.
• Administrative Recovery Cost – see Carrier Recovery Cost.
• Number Portability Surcharge – more profit
• Long distance billing charge – profit
• Cost Recovery Surcharge – the grandaddy of them all.  It defies explanation. 
• RFC Charge – this is my very favorite.  When they run out of official sounding phrases and start using random combinations of letters, you know you are in trouble. 

There are quite a few more and they all sound equally official and important…….AND CONFUSING.  Once again, I don’t mind them charging the fee, I just want them to be up-front about it.  One more point about surcharges is that the carriers typically have the right to add these fees in the middle of the contract.   During these economic times, I’ve seen a significant increase of “surprise surcharges” over the past year.  You can’t really avoid or predict them but you CAN make a big fuss if they surprise you with a surcharge.   If you do, often times they may offset the new charges with discounts on the existing services.  

Taxes – Do not confuse surcharges with taxes.  Taxes are mandated charges of course and those dollars do go to the various government agencies.  You don’t have to like them, you just have to pay them.  These fall into the category of  typical taxes and they vary but city, county and state so you may not always be able to get this information quoted ahead of time.  But I typically assume between 10% – 12% for Federal, State and Local taxes. 

I want to make it clear that I am not against telecommunications carriers making a profit.  In fact, I want them to be profitable and financially sound because that means there is more competition.  More competition is good for the industry in terms of innovation and pricing.  But it is also good for…..for lack of a better phrase…..keeping each other sharp.  Trust me, where there is limited or no competition, customers are at the mercy of the carrier and the result is usually appalling. 
​
In my next few posts, I am going to write about the best ways to buy long distance, Internet services, negotiate contract lengths and other items to look for and negotiate.  As I’ve indicated, you can experience a 30% difference one way or the other depending on how you negotiate these items.   Thirty percent!!  I daresay that if you could affect all of your costs by 30%, it could be the difference between strong profitability and un-profitability.