Can You Save 50% On Telecom Costs?

Here we are in the midst of an intractable economic recession and you may still be paying twice as much for your business telecom services as you could be. Need a quick and painless way to cut the budget without having to let people go or cut necessary services? OK, then stop paying so much.

If you are anxious to start saving, get a cost savings evaluation right now and then come back to finish reading the rest of this article. I’m going to explain why a 50% savings is well within the realm of possibility for your company.

First, let’s see where the savings are. Nearly every business buys two principal telecom services. These are telephone and broadband Internet. Larger companies, those with multiple locations, or companies in certain fields will also buy point to point or multi-point bandwidth to link two or more locations. Do you have telephone? Do you use the Internet? Do you have a private link to another location? If so, you have a cost savings opportunity.

Now let’s see why these cost savings are available. First, the telephone and networking industry has become more competitive, especially since federal deregulation of telecom services. There are a lot more players than there used to be and they’re all hungry to expand their customer base. That alone accounts for a major slide in long distance telephone rates and digital bandwidth prices. Did the price of a garden variety T1 line drop by half over the last few years? You bet it did.

This is part of the secret to cutting your telecom bill in half. Business telecom services, like T1, DS3, & OC3, are sold on a contractual basis for one, two or three years. You get the lowest prices with the longest contracts, so the three year contract is often the most attractive. You may or may not be contacted to sign another contract when that one expires. If not, your service doesn’t generally just switch off. You go on a month to month basis for as long as you keep paying your bill. Some companies have been paying the same rate for years and years and have given no attention to comparison shopping.

One reason is that when you bought your original service, there was only one game in town and that was the local telephone company. What you don’t realize is that during that time other competitive carriers have started serving your area, likely with lower prices. Unless one of their sales team happens to call, you probably won’t even know they’ve come to town. More service providers means more offerings and better pricing, but you have to know how to get in touch with them.

The is the first way to get a dramatic cost savings. Do some comparison shopping. You still have to know where to find these carriers, who may or may not have an office in your location. You can try the Yellow Pages, but you’ll have to put in some time and effort to make the calls and compare the offers. Chances are, you’ll probably still miss some good opportunities.

The easier and faster way is to engage a telecom services broker who represents dozens of carriers. You pay the same rates you would if you hunted down the service provider yourself, but you don’t have to put forth the time and effort for comparison shopping. You’ll find that you get fast and friendly service from Telarus, Inc. for competitive telecom pricing. Just be prepared for a shock when you see the offers you’ve been missing.

The other reason that major cost savings are available for the asking is that new types of services have proliferated in the last few years. Ethernet over Copper is now a major competitor with T1 lines. You can generally get twice the bandwidth for the same amount of money if this service is available for your location. If you have a T1 line but are only lightly using it for credit card verification, email and Web access, you can probably save half the monthly cost with 3G fixed wireless broadband. This service is available nationwide and, unlike T1, is practical for temporary business locations like holiday stores, construction sites and conventions.

On the telephone side, that T1 line of yours could be doing double duty. SIP trunking and Integrated T1 combine business phone service and broadband Internet access on the same line. Unlike do it yourself VoIP, this is a carefully engineered solution that assures the quality of your telephone conversations regardless of what is happening on the computers or Internet.

Another recent telephone innovation is hosted PBX. Forget paying for all that telephone equipment and incoming lines. All of that is now handled in the cloud. You pay by the seat per month and your system is always functional and up to date with latest features. All you need in-house are IP telephones and a connection to your cloud provider.

For business applications that need to link several locations or more across the country, MPLS networks can’t be beat. You’ll easily save that 50% cost if you’ve grown your network gradually by simply adding point to point lines as you need them.

Got a few minutes? Want to save a bundle on your monthly telecom bills? Then just enter some basic contact information through T1 Rex and explain what you need. A friendly Telarus agent will be in touch at your convenience and send you a complete range of resources that meet your requirements, along with pricing. It doesn’t get easier and it’s hard to save more.

Where Competition Is Cutting Telecom Costs

Everyone is on the lookout for cost savings these days. One potential area of savings is in your monthly telecom costs. Telecom expenses tend to be be large and murky. It’s well worth your while to wade in and see what you can spot that is ripe for cutting or re-bidding. You should also be aware that there can be huge differences in what you pay depending on where you are located.

We tend to think that the price of goods and services are pretty much the same no matter where you are. You know that’s not true for real estate. It’s also not true for some telecom services. Location means everything. Let’s take a look at why this is.

We get the impression that telephone calls are all priced at a flat rate. That impression comes from the way cellular phone service is sold. You pay a flat rate for a fixed number of minutes each month. It doesn’t matter where you call, within the US and not overseas. A minute is a minute. You can call from your home office or you can call from a hotel in another state and talk to anyone in the country using the same minutes you use for local calls.

Landline services don’t generally work that way. You pay a monthly fee for dial tone and local calls. You typically pay by the minute for state to state long distance calls. There is also something called local long distance or IntraLATA (Local Access and Transport Area). A LATA is a geographical area handled by a particular phone company. These areas may include more than one city or a city and the surrounding rural areas. Prices for IntraLATA calls vary all over the place, with areas served by smaller phone companies typically more expensive than you’ll find in areas served by larger phone companies in more populous areas.

What’s upset the apple cart on this pricing model is the rise of VoIP service providers. Unlike local phone companies that are tied to their customers by dedicated twisted pair copper phone wiring, VoIP is a network service that is transported by the Internet, a private SIP trunk, or an MPLS VPN network. Your VoIP provider can be a Cable operator in your city or a carrier located across the country. Pricing plans can be similar to what you get from the telephone company or they can be unlimited local calling with a flat per minute rate for all long distance, or even a flat rate for unlimited domestic calling. By considering a VoIP solution, you give yourself more options to match your monthly telecom expenses closely with the type of calls you typically make and receive.

Competition in the line services market is even more intense. Here, the price you pay per Mbps for point to point data links or dedicated Internet access varies widely. In general, the closer you are located to the heart of a metropolitan business center, the better the pricing. Out in the country, your options are few and prices are higher.

A new service that has highly attractive bandwidth prices is Ethernet over Copper. Prices for both EoC and T1 lines are now under $300 a month in major cities, but you may get twice the T1 bandwidth for that price using Ethernet over Copper. You also have the ability to get higher bandwidths, such as 10 or 20 Mbps without having to bring in fiber optic service.

One limitation with Ethernet over Copper is that you need to be within about 12,000 feet, a couple of miles or so, of the service provider’s point of presence to qualify for service. That restricts availability to metro areas. So, too, other competing services such as HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax) and fixed wireless tend to have limited geographical service areas and tend to be found in town much more than farther out.

Regardless of whether you are looking for voice, data or video telecom services, or some combination, competition is greater today than ever before. You may not be aware of many options that have recently become available in your area. One fast and easy way to see if you can save on your monthly telecom expenses is to get competitive quotes for telecom services suitable for your business location. This process is fast, easy and free. You may be able to save more than you think.

3x3 Mbps Ethernet Doubles Your Bandwidth

Who couldn’t use a little extra bandwidth these days? The size of files, applications and web pages has been steadily increasing. Unfortunately, IT budgets haven’t. What would you say if I told you that you could double your bandwidth and not have to pay any more than you do now? Would you go for a deal like that?

It may seem odd to think that you can get twice the bandwidth for the same line cost that you are paying now. After all, network service providers aren’t in the business of giving away something for nothing. Of course not. The cost savings doesn’t come from simply replacing what you have with an identical service from another vendor. It comes from switching to a newer technology that has lower costs.

You could double your bandwidth with your current vendor or a competitive one if you want to stay with T1 line service. What you do is call up and order another T1 line to be bonded with the one you are running now. Bonding is a process of making two lines work as if they were one larger line. A T1 line has a bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps. Bond in a second T1 line and you have 3 Mbps. 

There are a few limitations to this process. First, you need to get both of your T1 lines from the same vendor. That’s either the carrier you have now or a new one for both lines. Second, your monthly bill is going to double. After all, two lines equals 2x the cost. You may well be able to pay less than twice your current line charges by going with another vendor that charges less for the same service. But this alone it isn’t likely to get you 3 Mbps for the price of 1.5 Mbps. 

Instead, consider changing from T1 line service to Ethernet over Copper. Both are highly reliable WAN services with dedicated bandwidth for business applications. Both services are available as managed services with the service provider taking care of any customer premises equipment needed to interface to the lines and to your network. 

The other similarity between bonded T1 lines and Ethernet over Copper is that they are both delivered over multiple twisted pair copper wires. These are the same copper wires that already come into your facility to provide multi-line telephone service. There is a technology difference between the signals on a T1 line and those on an Ethernet line, but from a users perspective they operate the same. 

What isn’t the same is the cost. Ethernet over Copper is a newer technology that makes more efficient use of the potential bandwidth available from copper landlines. Ethernet over Copper or EoC pricing is very aggressive and is currently running at about half the cost of double bonded T1 lines. In other words, you pay the same for a 3 Mbps EoC service as your pay for a 1.5 Mbps T1 service. 

There are a couple of other differences, too. T1 only scales up by increments of 1.5 Mbps. Every time you bond another T1 line you add 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth. Ethernet is far more granular. You can find Ethernet bandwidth services from 1 Mbps on up to 10 Gbps, although the higher line speeds require fiber optic cabling. But unlike T1 lines, Ethernet over Copper has a limited service footprint. You are most likely to find it in major cities and suburbs, not out in rural areas.

Would you like to double your bandwidth for the same money you spend now? Get pricing and availability for 3 x 3 Mbps Ethernet over Copper or other Ethernet bandwidth services to see how much savings is available at your location.

2x2 Ethernet Takes on T-1

T1 lines have been the go-to commercial telecom service for small and medium businesses over the last decade. Now a challenger is taking on the venerable T1 line. It is a brand new service called 2x2 Ethernet that’s just been launched by MegaPath, a major nationwide competitive carrier. Let’s see what 2x2 Ethernet has to offer.

You might not think that T1 lines were subject to much competition. After all, the technology is half a century old and heavily entrenched. T1 was the first broadband digital line connection readily available to businesses. It came out of telephone company research and was used as a trunking system to transport telephone calls between switching centers long before it was offered to commercial companies. With repeater technology and the ability to be deployed over two unshielded twisted pair telco wires, T1 has risen to become dominant for digital telephone, point to point connections and dedicated broadband access.

Ethernet came out of the computer industry rather than telephony. Ethernet has grown to dominate local area networks for most companies. Until recently, Ethernet was considered a LAN technology and T1 was considered a WAN technology. There’s not much chance that T1 will move into the LAN, but Ethernet has been steadily encroaching on the metropolitan and wide area networks over the last few years. Now, it’s ready to make its move to take over the role that T1 lines still serve. But why?

Part of the answer is bandwidth. T1 lines offer a fixed 1.5 Mbps of symmetrical bandwidth. You get the same line speed in both the upload and download directions. Ethernet offers a variety of line speeds over both copper and fiber optic cables. The MegaPath 2x2 Ethernet runs at 2 Mbps for both upload and download. That’s a bit faster than T1, although the bandwidth increase alone isn’t what makes this service so attractive. In addition to the 33% increase in capacity, 2x2 Ethernet is easy to interface. The handoff from WAN to LAN is a standard Ethernet connector. No extra CSU/DSU interface circuitry is required, like you have with T1 lines.

What really makes the MegaPath 2x2 Ethernet service compelling is that it is priced less than a T1 line. Ethernet has enjoyed a per Mbps cost that often beats traditional telecom services, especially at the higher bandwidths. But this is a 2 Mbps service that costs less than a 1.5 Mbps service. Not only that, but you have a choice of configuring this service for either data only or voice plus data. With at least five lines of digital, analog or SIP trunking telephone service, the 2x2 Ethernet line cost is reduced even more. It would appear that we are in the twilight era of T1 dominance.

But what about availability? MegaPath has addressed this with Ethernet over Copper connections through 1,900 central offices nationwide. They estimate that over 90% of small and large businesses are within the footprint of one of these COs. MegaPath is actually a super CLEC or Competitive Local Exchange Carrier. The company is a merger of MegaPath, Covad and Speakeasy, all significant carriers in their own right.

Is your business in need of new connectivity or are you simply interested in seeing if you can get a better deal that what you’ve been paying for your existing T1 line service? If you have an older contract, that T1 might be costing you twice as much as it should. Find out for sure with a quick pricing and availability inquiry for Ethernet over Copper services. Higher bandwidths are also available for your more demanding applications.