BIZ|Tech Blog

I always try to learn from my mistakes.  Given that one of the prime focuses of our company is educating customers, I try to let them learn from my mistakes as well.  That can be a bit embarrassing at times.

Tuesday evening, I was relaxing a bit after returning from the gym.  My phone rang, and it was the alarm company reporting a burglary alarm at the office.  I left for the office pretty quickly, but assumed it was the cleaning people accidentally setting it off.  It looked like a false alarm at first, but as I looked around, I discovered that the inside door had been forced open, and the cash drawer stolen.  Not a big deal in terms of monetary value, but quite annoying.  It appears to be someone associated with the office complex, since getting to the side door requires a key to the a public hall in the building.

As the officer was completing his report, he asked about any video surveillance.  I glanced around, and remembered that we had installed a camera in the showroom so we could see who was coming it when we were not out there.  Unfortunately, we had never bothered to setup recording of the images.  Given the inside nature of the theft, were video available, the thief would probably be behind bars now.

The moral of the story is that if you are going to pay for technology, use it to its full value, and don’t let some of all of its features sit on the shelf.  That is a bit like having a deadbolt lock on your door, and never locking it.

According to industry statistics, 31% of businesses use some form of Voice over (VoIP) IP service today.  While the available statistics are not too specific, I suspect that this percentage represents mostly larger companies.  The same study indicates that by 2013, a total f 74% of businesses will use some form of VoIP.  This number is large enough to include many small and medium businesses.

In my experience, concern about call quality often stops smaller businesses from moving to VoIP.  That being said, the great potential savings involved, and the growing acceptance of VoIP for home phone service is winning them over.  In many cases however, once a smaller business decides to consider VoIP, they run into a roadblock - their legacy phone system.

To be honest, I would like to sell everyone with a legacy system who wants to deploy VoIP a new system.  It would mean better profit for me, and better satisfaction and superior call handling for them.  That being said, it is possible and practical to deploy VoIP with a legacy phone system.  This approach does not require ANY changes to the legacy phone system.

With the growing acceptance of VoIP, a number of manufacturers have begun  to produce analog to VoIP gateways.  These devices have a network connection and an analog line port.  The network connection is connected to your network, and the analog port to a phone line on your existing phone system.  The gateway is then programmed to communicate with a VoIP provider.

When a VoIP call arrives, your gateway converts it from VoIP to analog, and connects it to your phone system.  As far as the phone system can tell, it is an analog line.  Using this approach, you can mix and match analog and VoIP service to increase your capacity and minimize your costs.

We did an installation last week of a Patton 4112, 2-port analog gateway.  It was easy to configure, and resulted in excellent call quality.

In summary, if you want to get your feet wet with VoIP, but you also want to preserve your legacy phone system investment for as long as possible, consider a gateway.

I have been doing bookkeeping for many years for churches, non-profit organizations, and small businesses.  Unlike many people today whose knowledge of accounting extends only to the capabilities of Quick Books, I learned the hard way, with double-entry accounting using green ledger paper.  It might surprise you to learn therefore that I don’t do the bookkeeping for my company.  I can’t afford myself.

Here are the numbers:  My time bills out at a minimum of $85/hour, and most weeks, I don’t have trouble filling it.  When I do have gaps, my focus is on building the business, which pays dividends down the road.  My very competent accountant charges me $25/hours for his work, and since he is far more experienced than I, it probably takes him half the time it would take me.   Given the above, it is saving me at least $60/hour to use him instead of doing it myself.

As another example, we provide IT services for various law firms.  I suspect they bill $150/hour at a minimum.  If they pay us to handle their IT rather than trying to do it themselves, they save conservatively $65/hour.

The bottom line is that if you think you are saving money by handling routine tasks such as IT yourself, you may well be wrong.  This is the essence of the new outsourcing.

In our challenged economy, small businesses are constantly looking for ways to reduce their costs.  Many are combining offices, or renting spare offices to individuals.  Having multiple businesses in a single office can cause phone wars, with competition for phone lines, lack of privacy, and the inability to properly apportion costs.

In the past, a tenant in an existing office could just be another extension on an existing phone system, which caused many of the aforementioned issues, or could have the local carrier install one or more lines just for them, which was expensive.  We worked with one such customer last year, who had multiple companies in a single space, each with their own individual phone lines, resulting in very complicated cabling.

Voice over IP (VoIP) can be of great benefit in solving tenant issues.  Since VoIP lines are virtual, they do not involve the expense of the installation of a physical line.  A single number can scale to handle multiple incoming calls, and mutiple numbers can be used to direct calls without having the expense of multiple lines.

We had this situation occur today with one of our TalkSwitch customers.  This company had sublet a single office to an individual, and had let him use their existing phone number and line capacity.  This arrangement was causing difficulty for both sides.  To solve the problem, we opened a new nexVortex account for the individual, had a new number assigned to him, and set the TalkSwitch to route calls to that number to his phone only, and to only use his number for his outgoing calls.  We completed this within a few hours, resulting in two very happy customers.

If no VoIP-capable phone system exists, an inexpensive VoIP gateway could be used, which would allow an analog phone to be used with VoIP service.

In what qualifies as our most unusual support call of the year, we just got a call (from a staff member’s son as it happens), who reported that his cat had just jumped on his PC keyboard, causing the Internet Explorer toolbars to disappear.

The answer is that the cat accidentally put IE in full screen mode.  Using F11 gets is back to normal.

There are plenty of anti-virus packages on the market, but I wonder if anyone sells an anti-cat package?

We really do try to go the extra mile for our customers, even when it hurts our backs.  We were handling a relocation for a local company today.  We were moving a phone system, servers, PCs, and porting 30 numbers to a new carrier.  The cut went really well, and we had the customer’s phones up early in the day.  Since we had to wait around for the furniture setup to reinstall the PCs anyway, we pitched in and began carrying boxes and furniture.  While our backs are sore, we feel good about having been able to really help our customer get through the difficult day.

As a side note, I have not done many circuit cuts with Cavalier Telecom before today, but their work on this one has been top notch.  They installed a new T-1 in new space with the porting of 30 numbers in less than 30 calendar days.  They are offering some very low prices in this area, so if you are considering a T-1, they are a good choice.

While small and medium businesses have been cautious about adopting Voice over IP (VoIP) phone service in a big way, IP-based extensions are rapidly replacing digital and analog phones.  This is not surprising, given their advantages, the most significant of which is the fact that most are standards-based, meaning a buyer can mix and match phone systems and phones.  Given that phones are often 75% of the total purchase price of a phone system, this can be a big cost savings.  As an example, a recent customer bought only the PBX from us, electing to keep the IP phones they had purchased for use with a hosted phone service, a substantial savings.

Another advantage of IP extensions is that you can plug them directly into existing network connections.  Most IP phones have a built-in switch, allowing both the phone and the PC in an office to be connected to the same jack.  This approach does have call quality implications however.  If a PC and a phone are connected to the same network jack, and the user decides to stream hi res video while making a phone call, they may find that the audio on their call is choppy.

For existing offices with a single network jack in each office, this problem can be addressed by the use of a small network switch in each office that can prioritize voice traffic.  We sell an inexpensive 5-port switch with high-priority ports.

For those building out new space or planning a major remodel, now is the time to plan for optimal cabling for IP phones.  Ideally, each office should have a network jack for a PC, and one for an IP phone.  This allows IP phones to be on a spearate network, maximizing performance and call quality.

If you are building new space but want to stick with digital or analog phones for the time being, I suggest you do what I have recommended to my cabling customers.  Install a jack for each digital or analog phone using cat-5 cable, and terminate them appropriate to the existing phones.  Later, when you want to switch to IP phones, it is a simple matter to have those cables re-terminated to cat-5.  The cost differential between cat-3 and cat5 cable is minimal.