Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

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?
   
   

1.SIM only. Breaks the tethering of airtime and handset contracts.

A recent Swan Independent Research survey into SME communications suggests that SMEs are falling behind in their Internet connectivity simply because they are not aware of what’s available.

A recent survey by Swan Independent Research of 12,000 UK SMEs with 10-100 employees suggests now may be the time for IT Support companies to get into cloud telephony.

Only 80% of respondents said that they were satisfied with their current phone system, which nearly 60% said they purchased outright. Around 55% said they use a local IT support company and if they are unhappy with their phone system they may also be unhappy with their current phone system supplier.

This means that extrapolating from the survey size alone could throw up 1440 sales opportunities for IT Support companies. With over 400,000 SMEs in the UK with 5+ employees the opportunity could rise to 48,000.

Cloud telephone systems have come down in price recently so that the monthly rental is usually less than that of a traditional telephone system. For example the monthly maintenance, line rental and call charges for a 10-extension system is around £250 per month. Jola’s price for 10 seats, including calls, is £125/month.

Only 10% of respondents were already using a hosted system and it is thought that the slow take-up is due to concerns about speed and reliability of connectivity – usually broadband.

In Swan Independent Research’s August 2014 survey into Business Communications solutions, satisfaction with their mobile contract scored almost the lowest, beaten only by satisfaction with the overall cost of office communications.

Despite all the hype around cloud telephone systems only around 10% of SMEs are actually using them, according to a recent survey by Swan Independent Research (SIR).

Jola offers a communications audit service that is free to SMEs below a certain size. In the last audit we conducted we calculated that calls costing our customer £300 per month were actually costing their supplier around £10 per month. 

The problem is one of perspective. The actual cost of calls has reduced by a staggering amount since BTs monopoly was broken in 1984. In those days it was not uncommon for a foreign exchange broker to be spending £2m a month on international calls. The same phone calls today would only cost hundreds of pounds a month. A 50-employee company with a phone bill of £500 might think they are getting a good deal until they find out just how much they could be paying.