Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

According to a recent survey published by the BBC, Britons spend more time using smartphones and accessing the internet than they do sleeping. They reported that we are spending over £2 billion pounds a year upgrading to the latest handsets with the average user upgrading every two years. The average life of a handset is much longer so it will come as no surprise that bosses are looking at ways of retaining handsets for longer to avoid the ever-increasing staff mobile bill.

New iPhone

The new iPhone 6 is being advertised as bigger than bigger. Described by TechRadar as "one of the best mobile phones Apple has ever created” it has a new design and a host of new features.

Cost

In terms of cost you are looking at £539 for the 16GB version, £619 for the 64GB option and £699 for the 128GB model. On a contract these start at around £45 per month, with roughly £100 for the phone up front.

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.