Carroll County Times Articles
Welcome To the World of Telephony, Part II
by Mike Shelah – July 2, 2006
Businesses should periodically review their current phone bills to look for ways to save money. There may be charges that you think are required, or even necessary, but may not be.
Custopak and Custoflex
The first item is Centrex (also called Custopak and Custoflex). This is a feature bundle on your telephone line that you pay a premium for (typically $5-$7 per line monthly). Over 90% of businesses have Centrex on their phone bill and less than 5% use its features on a regular basis. Centrex was originally designed to bypass the need for telephone equipment. It provides a number of features that even the most basic home telephones now have built in. The most common feature that people use is called Hunting (this allows one line to roll over to another line in a “hunt group”). Because this important feature is only .52 cents per line, I recommend you buy the feature and dump the package. If you have six telephone lines, this could save you close to $500 a year on your telephone bill.
Wire Maintenance
The second item is wire maintenance. The idea behind this is simple; telephone provider companies are required to service your phone lines up to the minimum point of entry on your building. This is often called the demarcation point. Once it gets past that box you have “inside wiring” that they will not service unless you have wire maintenance. Now here is the part that isn't made clear – wire maintenance does not mean that the provider company will fix it for free if it breaks. What it does mean is that you will get a discounted hourly rate if work is needed. My advice is to find a local cabling company that you can have come to do work as needed. Frankly, these wires rarely go bad and you will need a good cable vendor if you ever do any type of expansion anyway. Typically, wire maintenance costs $2-$4 a month per line, so if you have six telephone lines this could save another $290 per year.
Local Calling
The last item is local calling. As a business, you can make local calls one of three ways: Unlimited Calling (via a freedom package), Per Message Unit and Measured Service. The freedom package has become very popular but rarely saves a company money. It is a flat rate package that most businesses don't make good use of (unless of course you have a sales force making a high volume of sales calls).
Message rate is a per call charge of .0928 per call, regardless of the length of the call. Measured service is based on the length of each call. You are charged .031 for the first minute and .013 each additional minute. Here is secret. The average business call is four minutes or less. Sure you make some 20-30 minute phone calls, but think of all the one minute calls you make. They average out to four minutes a call. At measured rate, your average cost per call goes down to .07 per call (a 25% reduction in cost). The average business line makes 100 to 120 calls per month. If you have six phones lines that generate 720 calls in a month, you are paying $66.82. On the measured plan, you would pay $50.40, a savings of another $198 annually.
In this article I have shown you how to reduce your phone bill an average of $1,000.00 a year. Once you start looking at other options of local and long distance carriers, the value and savings can really start to add up.
About the Author
Mike Shelah is an Account Executive for Teltek Systems, Inc., and a member of the Carroll Technology Council, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating businesses, government and residents about technology issues. Questions are welcomed and may be addressed in future articles. Email advisors@carrolltechcouncil.org or go to www.carrolltechcouncil.org for a list of Advisor categories.
Article content is the view of the author, and not necessarily the viewpoint of the Carroll Technology Council.
