A “Realistic” Picture of IP Telephony’s Cost Savings (Pt 2)
Think about it this way- unless your department is already grossly over budget, or unless your department has been explicitly instructed to cut costs, saving money isn’t that big of a deal in-and-of itself. In the absence of immediate budgetary pressure decision makers aren’t looking to spend less.
A “Realistic” Picture of IP Telephony’s Cost Savings (Pt 1)
Price is a huge factor when it comes to deciding between sticking with traditional telephony services and making the jump to IP telephony. It’s one of the biggest selling points IP telephony providers use to push their technology, and it’s one of the clearest, firmest, more directly measureable ways decision-makers at an organization can see the benefit of switching over to IP. After all, while organizational flexibility and scalability are great benefits they can seem a little abstract, factors whose potential may be difficult to envision when a business is currently locked into a relatively fixed traditional telephony technology set-up.
Hosted PBX Bundles
Depending upon the hosted PBX service provider you choose, system features and capabilities in addition to bundles and pricing will vary. If you are just beginning to research hosted PBX as an option for business telephony, this article will help you understand common practices of bundled hosted PBX pricing, the general restrictive nature of any type of service bundling, and how it can limit business choices.
USF AND FLAT RATE PRICING PLAN (PART 2)
With the massive explosion of mobile devices fewer and fewer telecom providers continue to charge their customers based on usage, at least usage that’s as specifically defined as it was back in 1996. These days pricing tends to follow the model of flat-rate pricing, which basically states “a call is a call is a call is a call.”
Local calls and interstate calls now cost the same amount of money and get tallied together in the same column. And that’s to say nothing of the various other simplified payment plans that really mess with the idea of the USF’s tax plan. How can you accurately tax interstate communication if it’s included within an unlimited calling plan? How much of the cost of an unlimited calling plan’s price goes towards providing interstate communication?
USF and Flat-Rate Pricing Plan (Part 1)
After some deliberation the government decided to throw this tax on each provider’s interstate end-user revenue. This sounds reasonable at first. After all, every involved segment of the telecom industry produces interstate end-user revenue. But the government failed to spot a really powerful trend in the telecom industry, one that wouldn’t hit full bloom until well after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed, one that now dominates the telecom industry and throws a big-old wrench in this now defunct, but still operative, fee.
And that big-old wrench is known as the flat-rate pricing plan.
Price Wars Among Business VoIP Service Providers
Price wars result in some providers making service costs less transparent. The more complex the VoIP service provider pricing is, the more difficult it is to compare it to competition. Bundling “free phones” into the price of many of the hosted PBX services makes it even more difficult to distinguish individual price components. Some VoIP service providers even choose to hide their prices from their prospective clients. Instead of making their prices as obvious and transparent as possible, they force their prospective clients to sit through long sales pitches and needlessly complicated explanations of services offered, all in an effort to confuse these prospective clients into paying more than they need to.