Does a fixed cost reduce your spend?

Posted by Steve on Sep 25, 2010 in Business VoIP

In my current role to develop business for virion business voip phone systems I’ve come across some fascinating information about fixed costs. Fixed line customers are being sold on the idea that a fixed cost will insure them against a potentially exorbitant phone bill. They are being told that, for a fixed cost, you can make unlimited* calls. Telstra offer this service through their dealers (when I last checked today) in a product called BusinessLine and I was fascinated to learn about it because it has been around since 2001 according to a post on the ATUG (Australian Telecommunications Users Group)..

The problem only seems to appear after customers are in these contracts for a while or so and when they look at their call spend to discover that they might not be best on a fixed cost contract after all. Does the fixed cost concept provide you with a better rate or does it provide the telephone company with income insurance to ensure a consistent revenue?

I recently did some research for a virion business voip customer who was using voip for all their outbound calls and noticed that their bill didn’t come down as much as they expected. After receiving a copy of their last Telstra bill and performing a phone bill analysis I discovered the BusinessLine Select FFF and a Google search led me to the pricing of this fixed price offer. It may have been a good offer in 2001 but with local and national calls commonly at the same rate with most Telco’s offering untimed calls, the old rates just don’t seem to cut it.

Telstra BusinessLine Select Plans

The problem with these charges is that they are on top of the almost $40 per line you pay Telstra as a business owner.

The customer with this bill is best of cancelling all these fixed payments (saving them $130 per month) and replace 2 Telstra PSTN lines with 2 VoIP services (saving them another $50) per month. Most prudent small business owners use their fixed cost mobile plan to call mobile numbers and their landlines to call local, national and international and line rental is one of the biggest burdens in having a PSTN phone line. One PSTN line and a business grade Broadband plan is all you need to start with and any extra services can now go through your Internet.

The only time a fixed price is good is if it is cheaper than your monthly average spend over a 12 month period and cheaper than the available technology of the day. In this scenario it’s not good.

*Is there such a thing as unlimited really? It’s an issue covered in this blog post about Fair Use Policies.

A softphone can save you hundreds of dollars

Posted by Steve on Apr 24, 2010 in Business VoIP

softphone for virion business voip

An application that is installed on your computer and allows you to connect to a telephone service and make outgoing and incoming calls is a softphone. The limitations are that these programs are tied to your computer, but if you are desk-bound, no problem.

I am currently on the search for a good softphone application that enables you to not only make and receive calls, but put calls on hold, transfer them to another extension and generally have the functionality of a typical receptionists switch. Here are the links to the two most highly recommended applications I could find:

3CX VoIP Phone for Windows: http://www.3cx.com/VOIP/voip-phone.html

X-Lite VoIP Softphone: http://www.counterpath.com/x-lite.html

Each of these organisations offers a wider range of products that you can upgrade to if you like their basic product but as always, you need to be watching out for perpetual license fees. I haven’t discovered anything about the fees yet, so stay tuned for future posts on this topic.

So far the winner appears to be the solution from CounterPath because they have a product called Bria 3.0 which has BLF which basically means that it will detect when others in the group are on a telephone call! There’s some basic Outlook integration. Here’s a comparison of the different software products from CounterPath: http://www.counterpath.com/xlite-comparison.html

After downloading and putting them through a couple inward, outward and simultaneous calls I have to admit that the 3CX phone came up as the one that was easiest to use and has the best User Interface (UI), but I am keen to try out the multi-user functionality of the CounterPath Bria 3.0!

Extra phone line for $14.95pm using your broadband

Posted by Steve on Apr 16, 2010 in Business VoIP

Do you want to get an extra phone line for your business? How about if that phone line and others in your organisation could make outgoing calls at VoIP rates?

With virion VoIP and Cisco products there are devices you can attach to your existing telephone pabx system that provide you with exactly that functionality. Best of all you will have the latest IP telephony at your finger tips. Simon Vermey from YourITSupport can come to your office and show you. For a free demonstration call virion on (02) 9971 8000.