Low Hanging Berries

I’d like to talk about one of the biggest costs of business – phones – and offer a clean way to mess some VoIP on your desk.

If you’re a bigger firm you will know that two workers with phones cost four times more, while three eager beavers cost nine times more, and so on? That is, of course, a generalization. But it sure feels true at the end of each month.

As a firm gets bigger it needs a more complex phone system such as a switchboard. When we commit to these it is often for a period that will outlast the cosmos, and backed by sureties that humble the Bill of Rights. This doesn’t stop our new PABX from going obsolete three days before hand over.

This means that when some sparky fellow phones on Thursday to chat about VoIP and how much money we will save if we replace the cro-magnon device we bought last year, our response will be short and to the point. We’re already so tied up that this could be the last string that breaks this camels back.

In most firms the really big phone bills come from just a few people. And the really, really big ones happen when your sales rep spends most of her time on calls to England, or the USA, or some other place that Telkom loves you to call. Why replace the entire PABX when you can just fire her?

OK, so that’s maybe a little extreme. But how about putting a second phone on her desk, so that when she makes a foreign call it bypasses Telkom? (This phone gets plugged into your network, rather than your PABX.)

I have just done that. It’s called a VoIP phone.

Most of my clients are in South Africa. Normally I use Skype to talk to them, but this can be as shaky as Telkom. Since it is almost free I can live with that, but I really want a better service. Soooo:

Get a VoIP phone for my desk. It can support lots of ‘lines’.

Set up a SA incoming line for clients. They call a local number at local SA rates. The phone rings on my desk in Ringwood when they call. There is no extra charge for the segment between JHB and my desk. The line quality is superb. When I call out, the same applies. I just pay for the last Telkom segment at local rates.

Subscribe to a couple of other VoIP services – and link each of them to a ‘line’ on my phone. Each of these offers an incoming line in Australia, UK, US, Norway, etc. When I make a call, simply choose the easiest/cheapest/best quality line for that country.

Suddenly my call costs are much, much lower. Why not do the same for your big phone users?

If I decide that I want a change move to, for instance, Clarens in the Free State (three weeks of English rain will provoke such thoughts) I simply pick up my VoIP phone and plug it into my ADSL router when I get where I am going. Those same ‘lines’ still connect to it. I am globally portable, in other words.

When I travel on business I can use free software on my PC that allows me to be at my ‘phone’ wherever there is a network. (Hotel room, coffee shop, airport, client’s office, or on a beach.) (For incoming and outgoing calls.)

I wax lyrical, but my point is simply this. Find the person in your firm spending the most money on overseas calls. Ask how much you would save if he could make unlimited global calls for just R75/month. (Or R0.15/minute if you don’t want the monthly commitment? That’s about the going rate to dial real phones in the outside world.)

And then look at setting up a VoIP phone for just that person. Later, when dinosaurs once again roam the earth and you’ve paid for that last PABX, you can think about replacing the entire system with a VoIP box. Until then, grab the low hanging fruit.

If you’d like to do something similar, REPLY. Tell me what you’re trying to achieve and I will happily share the team I use. (I don’t want them to be inundated, so will be vetting the requests.) My last few words, for now.

I talk about ‘lines’ but there is just one Ethernet cable plugged into my phone. My phone is linked to many VoIP lines in the same way that your Internet browser can have many sites open at the same time.

A few purists will no doubt point out that in SA ADSL lines come from Telkom.

Indeed, at some point in SA almost all lines go through Telkom before they see the light of day. I like to reduce that contact because, like piles, it is messy, it hurts and it costs lots to fix.