BUSINESS PHONE NEWS

How Does Verizon's New Unlimited Voice/Text and Shared Data Plan Change Your Phone Bill Budget?

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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Finally. One of the biggest phone companies on the planet did something that will make the life of a business owner a little easier -- or did they?

Click here to read the Verizon Wireless press release that states that they are eliminating all their different "buckets of minutes" rate plans in favor of just letting all their customers talk and text all they like for one flat monthly price.

"All you can eat" talk and text. That's gotta be a good thing, right?

If all your employees do is talk and text a lot this new plan certainly is good. Except your employees don't just "talk and text". What they seem to be doing mostly these days is "apping" it up with every data drinking phone app they can figure our how to download onto their phones.

"Cha Ching" (That's the sound of you paying for your employees' mobile data usage through Verizon's new "shared data" pricing -- which is the other half of their new pricing package.)

 

Will Your Business Wireless Phone Bill Go Up or Down?  Yes...

In effect, Verizon simply held up a mirror to its old pricing package and said, "This is the new package". Where they used to have unlimited data and metered voice and text, now they have metered data and unlimited voice and text.

To learn how this will affect business wireless phone bills I called two people I know that run business wireless expense monitoring and management companies, Moe Arnaiz from eMobus out of San Diego and Josh Lipton from Advantix out of Texas.

US Soldier Gets $16,000 Wireless Phone Bill for Data Roaming -- Is Your Phone Bill Properly Protected?

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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 This story from California about a US service man getting a $16,098 phone bill from his wireless cell phone company got me thinking on three different levels.

First, I thought that could easily happen to my phone bill since I have two sons about the same age as the US soldier in the story who both use their cell phones for just about everything you can think of except talking.

Second, what was the guy really doing with his phone that jacked the bill up so high and do I or any of my employees do the same thing?

Third, are there any safety measures set up on my own business wireless cell phone accounts (I use Verizon for seven business cell phones) to prevent the same sort of "bill shock" from showing up in my mailbox next month.

 

How Much Data Does the Average Employee Use or Need Every Month?

Surprisingly little I think. I honestly had no idea (nor did I seem to think I needed to care) since I still had Verizon's "unlimited" data plan on most of my businesses smart phones.

After printing out the summary pages of my business cell phone bill for the last four months I discovered that for seven business cell phones the total was under five gigs of data per month total. The range was quite large though as my own personal data use was under 200 megs a month (just 20% of one gig) while my oldest employee (over 70 years old) used seven times what I used at 1.4 gigs.

(It took me a while to discover what "business use" a desk bound 70-year old employee would have for 1.4 gigs of data usage per month. We narrowed it down to either streaming Pandora radio for several hours per day and/or the Scrabble dictionary app.)

I was somewhat relieved to discover though that even the most data hungry power users I knew (all three of my teenage kids and even my brother-in-law who's always video-Skyping his kids from the road) used under 2 gigs a month each - a lot of data but certainly manageable - I think (right?)

 

How Do You Create a $16,098 Cell Phone Bill?

So now that I've got a handle on my own business cell phone and data usage I go back to thinking, "How'd this poor US serviceman jack up his cell phone bill to over $16,000?"  Well if you read the story, it turns out the guy used 1.6 gigs of data in just six days while on leave visiting his parents.

We're Writing the "Business Phone Buyers Guide for CPAs" Book and Your Comments are Invited

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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Every week I work with all kinds of business owners, CIOs and IT directors to help them solve some business communications problem that touches their business phone system.

While all my clients want to either lower their phone and data bills, get more productivity out of their employees or beat their competitors in the marketplace, none of them want to buy a new phone system to solve their communications problems. And who can blame them? For many of my clients, the phone system they have now has lasted 10 or more years and they'd keep it except they can't get replacement parts for it anymore.

Sooner or later all of our clients will need to buy a new phone system and to help them do it we are currently writing a "Business Phone Buyers Guide for CPAs".

(It's for CPAs because I currently have a CPA client that's paying me to help them choose between several IP-PBX hardware solutions and hosted VoIP solutions for their new phone system. After the first buyers guide is written we'll rewrite it for the unique needs of other business types.)

 

Your "Here's What Happened to Us" Comments are Invited for the Book!

Every good "How To Buy" book of any flavor needs customer anecdotes and lessons learned. If you've purchased a new business phone system for your business over the past several years and have some "lessons learned" that you'd like to contribute to the book we'd love to hear and print them. Please email them to Dan@BusinessPhoneNews.com. 

If you've not purchased a phone system recently but think you will need to in the next year please also contact us and we'll share a copy of the book with you in e-book format. The book will be published by the end of July 2012.

How to Use Coax Cable Aggregation to Backup or Augment Your MPLS Wide Area Network

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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 For years the business phone companies have been telling business owners and IT directors that using any sort of cable Internet solution in a business environment is a bad idea because cable does not have any quality of service ("QoS") and is an inherently "shared" resource meaning a business would never get the data throughput they were promised.

Well that argument is certainly still being waived around by the telcos but after experiencing the successful use of cable Internet in their homes, few business owners or IT directors have a problem with the idea of backing up the wide area date network for their business with a professionally aggregated mix of coax cable providers.

But since all the cable companies have different service areas across the country, most businesses are hesitant to try an aggregated cable backup solution because of the problem of having to do all the aggregation in-house and then keeping track of individual cable company invoices.

Fortunately there are cable aggregation companies available to businesses that want to try an aggregated cable solution to backup or augment their main MPLS wide area network or "WAN". Of all the cable aggregation companies to choose from, few have the "one stop shop" success that has been found by Bandwave Systems out of Philadelphia. 

To learn just how a coax cable solution works when backing up or aggregating an MPLS network we recently interviewed Tom Azelby, Managing Director of Bandwave.

Click here to download a PDF copy of the white paper created from this interview.

To listen to the interview, click here to download the MP3 recording.

You can also listen now with your computer speakers by clicking the player below and then follow along by reading the transcript below. 

 

Interview Audio

Click the player above to listen to the interview now.

 

Interview Transcript

Dan Baldwin:  Today I'm speaking with Tom Azelby, the founder and managing partner of Bandwave Systems, a nationwide business broadband provider that integrates and aggregates all carriers and cable operators and technologies, DSL, T-1, cable, fiber, Ethernet, wireless and so on, so that businesses with multiple locations are provided a complete nationwide network solution with just a single point of contact. Tom, thanks for speaking with our audience today.

  Tom Azelby:  Thanks for having me, Dan.

  DB:  Tom, for years, IT directors have been led to believe that an MPLS network was the perfect solution to connect a nationwide multi-location business over a single wide area network, or WAN, but for multiple reasons, your company, Bandwave Systems has been brought in by MPLS carriers to augment and/or backup the MPLS solution they were selling a business.  

 

Question #1:  Why are MPLS carriers bringing Bandwave into their solutions?

  TA:  Well, I think one of the big reasons today is network redundancy, and coax cable is a diverse pathway to traditional Telecom infrastructure, so the Bandwave Cable -Connect product is a perfect fit for a redundant Internet connection.

The next reason Telecom Consultants and Carrier Sales Reps are coming to Bandwave is due to our experience. We've been in data aggregation since 2000. We were one of the first nationwide DSL aggregators. Today as a cable Internet provider or a cable aggregator, we have the experience, the relationships, and all the systems in place to provision and manage Nationwide Cable Internet Connections, Our main marketing message is one contract, one bill, one customer support, and we do that for Multi Site Enterprises using our partnership with all the cable providers Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, Cox, Brighhouse, RCN, Cablevision, Suddenlink, Mediacom (MSO’s).

How Do You Know Which of Your Employees Can Talk to Your Most Important Prospect Right Now?

By Dan Baldwin, Editor
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 Remember the old days when every credible business had a receptionist that had a huge receptionist phone covered with "busy lamp fields" (BLF) that showed which employees were on or off the phone?

She was indeed the "gatekeeper" because she always knew from looking at her BLF who within the local office could or could not take a call.

Moreover, even if someone (like her boss) could take a call, she know which calls to put through and which calls to put into "the trash" (a voicemail box where all messages were deleted without being listened to).

Well for good or bad, few businesses have receptionists anymore. But without a receptionist, how do people within a company know which other people in a company can take an important customer prospect call?

 

Say Goodby to "Receptionists" and Say Hello to "Presence"

What's "presence"?  Wikipedia defines presence as "a status indicator that conveys ability and willingness of a potential communication partner to communicate". Think "red light, yellow light, green light." 

As companies try to be more productive with fewer employees, it becomes critical to enable the sort of instant collaboration that minimizes voicemail and email "tag".

Always knowing "who can help" solve a problem "right now" and then taking advantage of that via instant collaboration via instant message or a phone call that doesn't go to voicemail is exactly how small nimble competitors often beat our their larger, slower competitors.

 

Buy Presence First - It's the Foundation for all of Your Unified Communications

At a unified communications conference I recently attended it was remarked that "every vendor wants to sell you presence" because once a vendor owned your presence system they basically became your key vendor and all other communication vendor solutions were subservient.

So if a receptionist with her "busy lamp field" phone represented "Presence 1.0" and digital business phone systems where everyone had a "do not disturb" button on their official desk phone represented "Presence 2.0", what solution represents "Presence 3.0" where every company employee knows the presence of every other company employee no matter how close or far away they are from their official "desk phone" - and which vendor should you buy your Presence 3.0 system from?

Who indeed. That's the current $64,000 question for business owners trying to stay one step ahead of their nearest competitor.

Computer Vendor, Phone Vendor, Cloud Vendor or Other? Who does presence best?