Choosing telecoms for an SME

We were recently faced with the dilemma of what would be the best telecom solution for one of our new ventures. With a rapidly growing team, we were wary of making a big investment that may not have longevity, so we required a scalable low cost solution. After some digging and speaking to a number of “specialists” it was apparent we had four options.

1. Traditional Landlines – you can get a BT landline installed, and then set up a contract with a landline provider. However, the desk phones (the handsets themselves) can be very expensive and setting them up on an internal network requires an engineer. Plus it is BT, and they have taken over 3 months to get round to our internet!

2. VOIP – Voice Over Internet Protocol. Setting up phones that use your internet connection to make calls, but they work and look like a traditional desk phones. However, again the handsets we found were prohibitively expensive too.

3. Mobile Phones – setting up a business mobile phone contract with multiple handsets and the minutes to be shared amongst the team.

4. Skype – Though they have launched their “business” product it is only available on PC, which is a shame as we are all on Macs and all Macs have a built in camera. To us, consumer Skype is just not any where near good enough to do the job.

After weighing up these options, we went with option 3 – mobile phones to be used in the office. They aren’t carried around by the team, so will suffer from minimal wear and tear. They can move with us if we move office, and they don’t require a landline to be installed or any other major inconvenience. Additionally the handsets are free of charge with most contracts, and will be upgraded each year. Also, many offer free calls to UK landlines which is great for office use!

Interestingly, we found the best deals are in fact on consumer tariffs so if you only need 1 or 2 handsets don’t set up a business contract. For some reason the business tariffs offer very little benefit in comparison to their consumers cousins. However, for any more than 2 handsets it is just much simpler, despite the price hike, to set up a business contract with your provider so you do not have multiple direct debits and bills to address each month.

All in all we think that their is a business opportunity here. For a mobile Telco to produce consumer style tariffs for business! Come on networks sort it out.