Time to reconsider Verizon?

Is it time to reconsider Verizon for land-based service?

The rumors of Verizon's demise in the land-based services space have been greatly exaggerated. There was a time when it seemed as though the mammoth carrier was headed towards a wire-less only future, but in recent years Verizon has made an aggressive push for wire-line products and services with promotions and a continued network build-out, bringing FiOS and IP-based services to commercial enterprises all over the northeast.

If you have some wireline services coming to term, now is a good time to re-visit what Verizon has to offer, even if you are currently a Verizon customer. Verizon seems to have this odd habit of neglecting to tell existing customers about their latest promotions. So, if you don't ask, they wont tell, and you could be leaving dollars on the table. Not to mention more bandwidth, storage and overall performance. Oh, and that Visa gift card promo for FiOS? They have one for business customers as well.

Contact LineSpeed for additional information and a cost comparison with other providers including Optimum and Comcast. We can tee up all of the pertinent information for you to make an intelligent decision. Not sure what your current term is? We can figure it out for you and submit a simple analysis revealing the true cost of options that make sense.

Steve Melillo
LineSpeed LLC
201-596-4000, x103

Get a better deal without changing providers

You know you could be saving money on your Telecom/Internet bill but you dread getting involved in that whole process? Let's examine:

First you will have to contact other providers. That means dealing with people who are trying to sell you something. This is at best, unpleasant for most people. They will want all your contact information, and you know they are going to start "bugging" you at some point or other.
Then you have to assemble your bills.

How many lines do you HAVE anyway?

What is your bandwidth? Is it the same up as it is down? Does it matter?

Do you have "direct inward dial"? How many numbers?

Are lines the same as number? What is a "trunk"?

But there might be an easier way: Contact your current provider. Here are some questions to ask THEM:

• What is the term of my service? Is there a contract? Or am I being billed "month-to-month"?
• Can you tell if there is traffic on ALL of my voice lines? If so, can you furnish a report? Are there any lines with NO traffic at all for an extended period?
• What current promotions are there that are a fit for my configuration?
• How can I save on my bill?
• What is the bandwidth that I am paying for on my Internet access? How can I test that to make sure I am getting what I am paying for?

If you haven't made changes to your service in several years, you are most likely in one of 2 scenarios:

1. Your contract has expired, and you are being billed "month-to-month". This is good and bad. Good because you are free to make a change without the threat of Early Termination Fees, and Bad because you have most likely been over paying for a while.
2. You are under a contract that has an automatic renewal and are now subject to ETF's for however long remains on the contract. You have to do some due diligence here and find out exactly what conditions have to be met to cancel the contract (if you decide to change carriers). Typically this means sending written notice at least thirty days prior to expiration anniversary.

Very often your current carrier is willing to make a better deal on the spot because they know you are looking and they want to keep you as a customer. BUT THEY WILL NOT TELL YOU ABOUT THESE DEALS UNLESS YOU ASK!!

For more info feel free to contact me:
Steve Melillo
201-596-4000, x103
or visit our web page: LineSpeed LLC

Cloud Migration: Building The Path

As you migrate applications and storage to the Cloud, you also increase your dependence on bandwidth capacity as well as availability. Your Path to the Cloud is as mission critical as the applications and data that reside there. Here are some important steps to consider:

1. Review and assess your current internet circuit(s) for through-put, "actual" speeds, history of availability, contract terms, SLA's and active management and monitoring.
2. Determine the maximum number of simultaneous users and obtain guidelines from your "as a service" providers to help with estimated bandwidth requirements. This is especially important for any voice applications such as Hosted PBX and SIP Trunks. Then give yourself a 20% buffer for spikes and modest growth.
3. Closely examine the capabilities of your existing network equipment and firmware revision levels. What is the capacity of your network infrastructure as it exists today? How many circuits can you interface with? What types of signaling are compatible? What are the upgrade costs?
4. Incorporate some redundancy. Circuits go down, and sometimes they take hours (days?!) to be restored. This does not have to be a bullet-proof plan (in most cases) that provides the same level of service and through-put as the primary circuit, but there needs to be some type of failover or people will not be able to work effectively during service interruptions. A dual purpose of this secondary circuit could be for your guest WiFi.
5. Meet with your current carrier(s) to review your current plan and find out what options are available. What services do they have that allow you to increase bandwidth incrementally as demand increases? Do they have a failover plan on separate facilities? Find out what your options are within your current contract terms. You might not have to reinvent the wheel.
6. Monitor usage on a regular basis and stay ahead. Bandwidth creep can be insidious, and go unnoticed until you hit a tipping point when users suddenly realize response rates have become tedious and frustration levels rise. Trying to implement a solution from scratch at this point could take weeks. Have a plan.

Dependence on Cloud applications and storage will most likely increase for most organizations. Make sure you have a robust Path to get there.

Steve Melillo
201-596-4000, x103

LineSpeed LLC LineSpeed LLC

smelillo@inclink.net

Circuit Redundancy: Don't wait for an outage

Your organization relies on stable internet access more than ever. Losing your internet connection means losing access to Cloud Apps and that means lost productivity, lost CRM continuity and potentially lost business. All it takes it one major service outage to drive this point home, but leaving your organization exposed for any length of time is a bad idea.

Loss of internet access is no longer just an inconvenience. It will cripple productivity and frustrate your customers as well as employees. Don't wait until there is an angry mob at your door with pitch forks and torches. Plan for service interruptions and failure NOW.

For small organizations, this can be as simple as adding a Cable TV circuit which will often include a wireless router.Reserve this internet access as a "guest" wifi network, so visitors to your office can have an easy to connect without introducing additional traffic to your primary network. Then if your primary circuit does go out, users can jump on the "guest" network and at least get some work done until the primary circuit is restored.

Automated failover to redundant circuits is more appropriate for larger organizations, but can be tricky to configure, and may also require additional equipment and/or licensing depending on the network architecture. However, the seamless continuity provided will make your users blissfully ignorant to downed primary cricuits.

Have a conversation with your trusted tech advisor to discuss this topic in more detail, but do not wait until you have an access crisis on your hands. Outages often have poor timing with respect to your deadlines and workflow.

Feel free to contact me with any questions.

LineSpeed LLC
201-596-4000, x103

Do you need IP Telephones?

Do you need IP Telephones? There has been so much hype around IP-Telephony and Voice over IP (VoIP) that I think sometimes people believe it has fully replaced every other kind of telecommunications systems available today. This is completely untrue. Although the vast majority of systems being sold today are at least "IP-Enabled" only a very small percentage are being installed with all IP-Phones, or even a mostly IP-Phones.

Of course the people spreading the hype are naturally the companies that manufacture and/or install IP-only telephone systems. They don′t have anything else to offer, so they want you to believe that they have the system that makes the most sense: The pure IP system. The fact of the matter is that IP, whether for IP-Telephony or VoIP, is simply another form of transport and does not inherently offer any additional features or applications in and of itself. It′s just another way of getting "there". And although we tend to refer to the internet as the "Information Superhighway", when it comes to transporting voice, we should really think of IP as "off-road" because much the same way a car requires special equipment such as 4-wheel-drive, special tires, greater clearance, etc, in order be driven on dirt roads or sand beaches, your voice communications system needs special equipment in order to travel over the internet or private circuits using Internet Protocol.

Routers and switches with QoS, and Cat5 cable to name a few. So what good does IP-Telephony or VoIP do for us? Plenty if it is deployed properly and with the intention of yielding some tangible benefits which need to be identified and evaluated BEFORE deciding on how much of your phone system, if any, should be IP. What kind of benefits? Let′s take a closer look at what you can and cannot do with an IP-Phone, versus a non-IP or ′traditional" digital phone.

Assuming a typical "plain vanilla" type organization, the needs of the telephone set begin with being able make and take calls, dial numbers, put a call on hold, transfer, conference, some flexible ringing perhaps. So far, no big deal. The ironic thing is that those manufacturers with only IP-Phones have gotten into the telephone business late, and they do not have the rich feature set that traditional telephone companies have been offering for many, many years. I′m talking about simple features like "Call-forwarding", and multiple call-forwarding, speed-dials etc.

But in reality, most organizations only use a small percentage of the features available in most telephone systems. The manufacturers create such feature-rich platforms in order to appeal to the widest customer audience. OK, so what are the real “killer apps” that take advantage of the fact that an IP-Phone is utilizing the same network infrastructure as your PC and servers? Unified Messaging? Outlook Integration? Click-to-Call? Believe it or not, none of the applications named above require an IP-Phone. Let me repeat that: You do not have to have an IP-Phone to be able to utilize Telephone-to-PC applications via your desktop or laptop PC, nor applications that reside on the server, including Unified Messaging and Outlook Integration.

Surprised? Most non-technical people are. It’s the hype. Then why are organizations deploying IP-Phones at all? The reasons are tactical: Overcoming geographic and logistical limitations of traditional circuits to achieve seamless integration of remote users. Or, to put it more simply: Anywhere you have internet access, you can have an integrated office phone. That’s right. And it will work just like the one sitting on the desk at your place of business. A remote office, work from home situations, a vacation home (aghhh!), multiple offices etc. are all good reasons for deploying IP-Phones.

How about VoIP? Does it allow me to make “free” calls on the internet? That question is a lot more complex than most people want to believe. First of all, you must understand that the business world still ultimately communicates over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Even organizations that are running pure-IP phone systems with all IP-Phones still have to connect to the rest of the world or all they have is a very expensive intercom. Copper trunks and/or some type of T1 will connect to a pure-IP phone system via some kind of gateway. What about VoIP T1’s you ask? Lol Well that’s a topic for another blog I think. But if you’d like to contact me, please feel free to do so by filling out the form and I’ll be happy to speak with you. I might even use an IP-Phone from my vacation home. And you’ll think I’m in my office. Unless you hear a seagull in the background.

Steve Melillo, President INS Technologies

Getting Value from your phone system

Getting Value #5: Getting Value from a business telephone system
3/7/09

With all the different ways to communicate these days such as email, cell phones, text, etc; do you ever find yourself wondering why you still have a business telephone system? Well there must be a reason. After all, didn’t you go through a lot of trouble and expense when you acquired that system? You probably went through some kind of bid process: Got 2 or 3 quotes, compared features, and warranties, maybe involved some of your staff, asked about service contracts, and on and on……...

So, even though systems today are not as expensive as they were several years ago, they still represent a significant investment of dollars and time. Now here is my question for you: Where is the VALUE? What kind of INCREASE has this investment brought you? Where is the PRODUCTIVITY? The GAIN? The PROFIT?

The business telephone system is a portal into your organization; a tool for increasing productivity, enhancing customer service and generally providing a platform for efficient communications on all levels. That efficient communication will help your organization become more profitable.

Now think about this: If your telephone system was having some kind of negative impact on your business or organization, how would you know? Have you ever overheard an employee say something along the lines of “This phone sucks!”? How might this be affecting the morale of other employees? What about customers?

In order for any business phone system to bring value to an organization, it must be configured and programmed properly and according to who your callers are and what you want them to experience. All phone systems today are very feature rich. Even the smallest office telephone today system has many of features that, a few years ago, would only have been offered in systems with several hundred phones. How those features and applications are utilized will determine how successful you are at optimizing value.

So when is the last time you thought about any of those features that were so important when you first acquired that system? Most businesses forget much of their system’s capabilities, and many useful features remain dormant or undiscovered for years, when they could be solving communications problems and building customer loyalty on a daily basis.

Try this sometime: Pretend you’re a customer, and call into the number that your company or organization publishes, the number that customers normally call into. What happens when you try to obtain some information? Or get through to a particular individual? Or how about place an order? Did you get what you needed? Any problems? Get transferred to the wrong department? Or how about this: You get transferred to a voicemail box of a former employee who’s been gone for 2 years! Yeah, that will make a good impression on your customers!! So what will you do about it?

Auto-Attendant or “Live Answer”?

Steve Melillo, President INS Technologies Call me: 973-787-1004 Or text: 973-632-5454