VoIP - ISP’s Need To Improve for Small Businesses To take up
I’m a manager in a small UK company whose portfolio also
includes looking after the company’s computers and
telecommunications. On a daily basis I am contacted by telecom
firms asking me if they can take ‘just 10 minutes of my time to
save me 60% on my phone bills or similar’. Now these guys are
not selling VoIP but something called carrier pre-select. That’s
when you pay your line rental to one company and pay for your
call charges to another, who will charge you at a lower rate
than the line rental company.
I have to say these guys are seasoned telesales people. They
know every trick in the book to keep you talking, a few haven’t
even got the hint from my standard line of ‘I need to finish
this conversation now and hang up the phone’. Anyway to get me a
better line to tell these guy’s I’d love to be able to say
‘we’re on VoIP, and you can’t compete with those prices’.
However, I can’t use that line yet. Why? Because my ISP
connection uptime is not reliable enough to switch.
A few weeks ago after a thunderstorm we lost full ADSL
connection in one of our branches for three days. Now if that
weren’t bad enough to lose e-mail capability and the various web
sites crucial to the running of our business, if we had lost
phone capability as well then as a recruitment agency we would
have lost both business and customers.
Until the ISP’s can guarantee a better continuation of service
then I shan’t be recommending VoIP to our Managing Director for
his business.
