The VoIP Market’s Gotten a Lot Tougher for the Little Guy (Pt 2)

In many ways, VoIP regulations and taxes favor larger corporations, in both financial and structural ways.

The Price Competition Factor- Who Pays the Bill?

As VoIP services find themselves increasingly taxed at the State and Federal level, there’s a big question of who, exactly, will pay for these taxes, and how these tax increases will affect competition between large providers and small providers.

Generally speaking, large providers almost always have a price advantage over small providers. That isn’t to say large providers offer a greater value than small providers, but it is to say their economies of scale almost always ensure they can sell their services for less than their smaller competition.

This gives larger providers a distinct market advantage over smaller providers as taxes on VoIP increase. Larger providers are going to be better able to pass these taxes directly on to their customers instead of paying them out of pocket. Often they’ll be able to do so while still offering cheaper services than smaller providers.

Smaller providers face a bigger question as taxes rise- should they make their customers pay these taxes, raising their rates? Or should they pay these taxes themselves, sacrificing some of their already slim margins in order to continue to serve their customers at the same price point those customers are accustomed to?

Once again- let’s reiterate that we aren’t talking about value here, that we’re only talking about price. When it comes to price, larger providers almost always have leverage over smaller providers, which means these increased tax burdens have hurt smaller providers far more than their larger competition.

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How Far is Too Far When Helping Clients in Tough Economic Times?

As a service provider offering essential phone service to our clients we need to make a lot of tough decisions regarding how we run our business, and that’s doubly true when our clients experience rough economic times. This is true not only for DLS but for many other smaller companies that develop close, personal relationships with their business clients over the years.

On the one hand service providers can be rather hard-nosed and impersonal with their clients and demand full payment, on time, every time their bill comes up due. Lots of providers take this approach. They don’t listen when their clients experience financial difficulties and they don’t make any overtures to help their partners out when times get tough. This hard-nosed approach is pretty common among larger service providers who tend to be less likely to ever meet their clients half-way.

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Listen to Your VoIP Service Providers Advice

Infoworld recently posted a great story detailing this exact problem and just how bone-headed IP telephony implementation can go, and how a simple mistake (like mis-calibration) can make an entire technology seem deficient.

In the story a VoIP service provider was called in to an organization to check out their communication system. The organization had been experiencing a lot of crippling problems with their IP PBX. The organization’s employees were experiencing degradation in call quality, dropped calls and busy signals when and where there shouldn’t. In other words this organization’s VoIP deployment has turned into a mess in a manner their old traditional telephony solution never had been.

Turns out they were using an IP PBX that wasn’t nearly powerful enough to meet their current needs.

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Could VoIP Service Become Illegal?

The thought of a communication technology becoming illegal sounds preposterous at first, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally impossible. In fact, a serious consideration to severely limiting or outright banning VoIP service providers is already given in one country, Ethiopia, and censored or otherwise limited in a number of other nations. True, none of these countries experience the level of freedom, and specifically the level of freedom of speech, that we enjoy in the United States, but their bans on VoIP clearly showcase how a seemingly innocuous technology reverberates with heightened political and economic meaning.

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Freedom to Choose Your Voice Service Provider?

Franchising business offers a good opportunity to various levels of business expertise and investment capital. Studies show that 97% of franchise businesses are still operating after the first year, compared to only 62% of independently owned. In most agency relationships, the franchisors are the risk takers whereas the franchisees prefer to steer clear of risks. In a franchising relationship, the franchisor and franchisee usually have different objectives

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