Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

Latest handsets making the news

There is evidence that the trend in the mobile consumer market towards SIM-only deals has now really taken hold in the business world.

SMEs are ditching pooled, usually 24-month, contracts in favour of more flexible deals where they can buy their handsets and airtime separately.

Jola have now gone one step further by offering an amazing SIM-only deal on a monthly contract.

Consumers have been moving towards SIM-only mobile deals for a few years and now UK SMEs are jumping on the bandwagon. Why?

Who are Jola Cloud Solutions Ltd?

Jola Cloud Solutions is an exceptional UK business communications supplier. We provide Internet connectivity and telephony to UK business start-ups, established SMEs and multi-sited enterprises via Partners. The company has a great track record for making connectivity easy to sell and ensuring customer satisfaction throughout the sales process.

Jola partners primarily with IT Support companies.

Something we hear from our Partners fairly regularly is “we don’t like salespeople and neither do our customers”.

Our Partners are technical experts and their customers know this. Consequently whenever there is a decision to be made on connectivity or telecommunications, research* shows that nearly half of them defer to their IT Support supplier. The smaller and less IT literate they are the more likely they are to treat their IT supplier as a trusted advisor.

Resellers risk their business for Government cash.

The voucher scheme

The Government has expanded and simplified its voucher scheme, which is great news for small businesses and telecoms resellers, who can now claim back up to £3000 on the installation of an Internet leased line. The end customer has to be in one of the 22 eligible cities and meet fairly broad criteria. The reseller needs to be registered on the scheme, which runs until April 2015.

There is little value in having great commissions paid on time if you cannot win the contract in the first place. There is also no point in partnering with a supplier for connectivity and telephony if niggles and downtime end up costing you money and jeopardising the relationship with your customer.

BT or not BT, that is the question

I regularly speak with small and medium sized businesses about their Internet access.

Very often they’ve found our website or been recommended to us because their business is being held back by poor performance or poor reliability of their broadband.  Low bandwidth, high latency and packet loss can cause many applications such as voice over IP (VOIP) and video conferencing to be unusable. 

A small dealer came to us to quote on his connectivity business. He had a mature base of leased line customers who were putting him under pressure and the incumbent (and previously enthusiastic) supplier inexplicably refused to return calls and emails. One of their customers was paying around £2000 per month for a 2Mb leased line and we could supply a 20Mb replacement for £200 per month. We would be making a 20% margin on this, putting our cost at around £160. The ISP they were partnering with had not passed on the wholesale price reduction and was probably making around £1800 per month on the 2Mb service - which had been installed for a few years. If they could delay the customer’s decision to move away by a month this would be the equivalent of nearly four years margin at the new price. You can probably see why they might refuse to speak to the end customer or the dealer. Of course the dealer would also be making less commission on the replacement service too but at least he would retain a customer that was also buying several other products and services from him.

All that glitters…

I have been in telecoms since 1984 and right now there has never been both so much choice and at the same time so much confusion around connectivity.

I went in to see a dealer’s customer last week who was running hosted Exchange and couldn’t understand why at certain times of the day it slowed to a crawl.

“It can’t be the network” he said, “I have an 80:20 fibre leased line and it only costs £50 a month”. “I think that may be an 80:20 broadband” the dealer replied.

An email advertising a 320Mb fibre leased line for around £300 per month arrived recently. This also looks like a bargain until you realise it is just four fibre broadband lines bonded together.

Comparing a dedicated leased line to broadband is like comparing your own driveway to the M6. Your driveway is 100% yours and even when you’re not using it you are not going to come home to find 10 other cars parked there.

80Mb sounds great, as does a four-lane motorway at 2am but in rush hour you might as well be on a B-road stuck behind a tractor.

Broadband is usually fine for web browsing and email but trying to run voice and critical business cloud applications over it will end in tears.

So here are some suggestions for questions to ask the next person that tries to ‘upgrade’ your connection to the Internet:

1. Is this circuit uncontended? i.e. is it dedicated to me?
2. Is it symmetrical? i.e. Can I send as much data over it as I can receive?
3. Does it prioritise voice and other sensitive traffic?
4. If it goes down will you guarantee to fix it the same day?
5. Whilst it is down will you provide a backup service?