By Utah Boat Rentals & Jet Ski Rental April 11, 2011
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By Asc Corporation February 10, 2011
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By Credit Clean January 29, 2011
We sincerely appreciate your request to connect on MC. We wish the very best in 2011 and each year after ... Sincerely Melony Vasho - President WebHead Ventures, Inc DBA Credit Clean ...read more
Now that you all have a better idea of what Voice over IP (VoIP) has to offer your business, it is time to learn the vagaries of VoIP offerings. CLEC's (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers) came into being after the break up of AT&T.; You may recognize some of the names... Paetec, XO, Cavalier etc. These companies place equipment into the Local Exchange Carrier's central office and capture your dial tone there. They then send it over their network of choice at a lower cost. AT&T was forced to do this as part of their break up. There is no difference in the architecture provided by most of the CLECs. They are, in essence, selling you the same service as AT&T at a lower cost. In some cases, this is all that a company needs but the sales people of the CLEC's infer that they are providing a VOIP solution when they are not. The problem that this causes is that it limits your choices for future expansion. I recently had a client who was looking for a new phone system for her office. XO convinced her to sign up for a voice and data T1 ASAP. This saved the company about 15% off their current costs. However, they now cannot consider any VoIP solution that bundles dial tone. Those solutions could have trimmed their costs over 60%! So now their choice is limited to how much they want to spend on phones. These CLEC solutions are referred to as "integrated circuits" and can save a business money by "sharing" a T-1 for Internet access. This sharing sometimes means providing a portion of the T1 for voice and a portion for data. Some offer "dynamically allocated" T1's which allocates the available bandwidth where needed. You need to know which is which and what consequences can be caused by a spike in phone or Internet usage. Another "innovation" of the old phone architecture is a PRI (Primary rate Interface). This technology breaks a T1 into 23 channels that can be used for voice. You must have a phone system capable of using a PRI card to use this, The PRI rate is lower than POTS (plain old telephone system) lines and can deliver dial tone at a lower rate. Many times a CLEC will quote on a PRI solution. It can be dedicated or split between voice and data. None of these solutions are Voice over IP. They certainly work, but they are far more costly than VoiP and still fall within the pervue of your current Local Exchange Carrier. I have partnership agreements with several CLEC's simply because there is a time and a place for each solution and you have to consider the cost of the TOTAL implementation. On the other side of the spectrum you have VoIP. Voice can be offered using a SIP (Session Interrupt Protocol) Interface which has become the defacto standard of the VoIP world. SIP uses 2 different codecs to deliver voice ... v.729&v711. Most VoIP providers use v.711. With this protocol , you can only get about 15 concurrent calls on a T1 vs the 23 you can with old voice technology. This is usually not a problem if you are considering a hosted VoIP solution since it doesn't utilize "lines" in the same way the old phone systems do. If you are considering just replacing your current PRI or Phone lines, use a VoIP provider that can support v.729 which will provide 33 concurrent calls rather than 23 with a PRI. If you ask a salesman from either a VoIP provider or a CLEC, they will not try to determine which solution is best for your company. They will tout the benefits of their offering as best, regardless of the situation. How does hosted VoIP utilize lines differently? In a traditional phone environment all incoming calls go to a designated line. Once that line is engaged it is not available to ring anymore. That means that if you take a call and a more important one comes in on that same line it will go to someone else, who may not understand the importance, or to voice mail. With VoIP your phone will ring and the caller ID will tell you who is calling. If you place the current call on hold it does not take up a line because it is on hold at the hosted provider. With a traditional phone system, once your line are full; the caller usually gets a busy signal. With VoIP, callers never get a busy signal and each user can define his own call handling characteristics. Some VoIP suppliers utilize a Premise Based IP PBX to furnish the functionality that hosted suppliers provide. In this case calls are transferred on a "line" basis much like a traditional phone system. That allows these providers to supply VoIP dial tone to companies with traditional phones. The advantage here is that some of these providers can combine line requirements between multiple locations and burst additional lines if necessary. This can create an outstanding savings. The local cable company has been flirting with the VoIP world for some time. They usually offer their own phone solutions but most of these use traditional phone architecture and are seldom the answer for companies with more than 8 lines. They can serve, in many cases, as the provider of the broadband Internet access to many VoIP providers. In larger companies, many cable companies offer dedicated fiber data connections as a better alternative to bonded T's. Using a Fax machine with a VoIP provider is not recommended. Most companies choose to utilize fax via the Internet software to eliminate the need for standalone fax machines. Others simply choose to keep an analog line with the local phone company for this purpose. They can often share that fax line with a DSL line to provide a level of phone redundancy heretofore not available. One last consideration is the viability of the company providing the dial tone. After all, AT&T is one of the largest corporations in the world. That is true, but wasn't General Motors right up there with them? I am certain, that anyone who chooses AT&T for their dial tone can sleep well at night knowing that their phones will ring tommorrow. Of course they will be paying a steep premium for that good night's sleep. Many CLEC's have filed for bankruptcy or even gone out of business but no one, I know of, has had their phones shut off because of it. The fact is that the user base of any phone company is its most valuable and liquid asset. It is a very competitive marketplace with other companies standing in the wings waiting to deliver dial tone. With the financial woes that Nortel is experiencing, one should be more concerned over the viability of their phone manufacturer. There is no law requiring parts to be available for any specified length of time. As a matter of fact, a local VoIP provider filed for Chapter 11 in April. I don't know what the future of that company is but the majority of its clients are aware of alternatives that can be switched to without any discontinuation of services. Considering today's economy, one of the simplest ways to influx some cash into a business is to trim operating expenses. Having your phone bills checked is an easy way to start. I am more than willing to answer any questions my opinions may create. ...read more
By Business Solutions Advisors October 30, 2009
Now that you all have a better idea of what Voice over IP (VoIP) has to offer your business, it is time to learn the vagaries of VoIP offerings. CLEC's (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers) came into being after the break up of AT&T.; You may recognize some of the names... Paetec, XO, Cavalier etc. These companies place equipment into the Local Exchange Carrier's central office and capture your dial tone there. They then send it over their network of choice at a lower cost. AT&T was forced to do this as part of their break up. There is no difference in the architecture provided by most of the CLECs. They are, in essence, selling you the same service as AT&T at a lower cost. In some cases, this is all that a company needs but the sales people of the CLEC's infer that they are providing a VOIP solution when they are not. The problem that this causes is that it limits your choices for future expansion. I recently had a client who was looking for a new phone system for her office. XO convinced her to sign up for a voice and data T1 ASAP. This saved the company about 15% off their current costs. However, they now cannot consider any VoIP solution that bundles dial tone. Those solutions could have trimmed their costs over 60%! So now their choice is limited to how much they want to spend on phones. These CLEC solutions are referred to as "integrated circuits" and can save a business money by "sharing" a T-1 for Internet access. This sharing sometimes means providing a portion of the T1 for voice and a portion for data. Some offer "dynamically allocated" T1's which allocates the available bandwidth where needed. You need to know which is which and what consequences can be caused by a spike in phone or Internet usage. Another "innovation" of the old phone architecture is a PRI (Primary rate Interface). This technology breaks a T1 into 23 channels that can be used for voice. You must have a phone system capable of using a PRI card to use this, The PRI rate is lower than POTS (plain old telephone system) lines and can deliver dial tone at a lower rate. Many times a CLEC will quote on a PRI solution. It can be dedicated or split between voice and data. None of these solutions are Voice over IP. They certainly work, but they are far more costly than VoiP and still fall within the pervue of your current Local Exchange Carrier. I have partnership agreements with several CLEC's simply because there is a time and a place for each solution and you have to consider the cost of the TOTAL implementation. On the other side of the spectrum you have VoIP. Voice can be offered using a SIP (Session Interrupt Protocol) Interface which has become the defacto standard of the VoIP world. SIP uses 2 different codecs to deliver voice ... v.729&v711. Most VoIP providers use v.711. With this protocol , you can only get about 15 concurrent calls on a T1 vs the 23 you can with old voice technology. This is usually not a problem if you are considering a hosted VoIP solution since it doesn't utilize "lines" in the same way the old phone systems do. If you are considering just replacing your current PRI or Phone lines, use a VoIP provider that can support v.729 which will provide 33 concurrent calls rather than 23 with a PRI. If you ask a salesman from either a VoIP provider or a CLEC, they will not try to determine which solution is best for your company. They will tout the benefits of their offering as best, regardless of the situation. How does hosted VoIP utilize lines differently? In a traditional phone environment all incoming calls go to a designated line. Once that line is engaged it is not available to ring anymore. That means that if you take a call and a more important one comes in on that same line it will go to someone else, who may not understand the importance, or to voice mail. With VoIP your phone will ring and the caller ID will tell you who is calling. If you place the current call on hold it does not take up a line because it is on hold at the hosted provider. With a traditional phone system, once your line are full; the caller usually gets a busy signal. With VoIP, callers never get a busy signal and each user can define his own call handling characteristics. Some VoIP suppliers utilize a Premise Based IP PBX to furnish the functionality that hosted suppliers provide. In this case calls are transferred on a "line" basis much like a traditional phone system. That allows these providers to supply VoIP dial tone to companies with traditional phones. The advantage here is that some of these providers can combine line requirements between multiple locations and burst additional lines if necessary. This can create an outstanding savings. The local cable company has been flirting with the VoIP world for some time. They usually offer their own phone solutions but most of these use traditional phone architecture and are seldom the answer for companies with more than 8 lines. They can serve, in many cases, as the provider of the broadband Internet access to many VoIP providers. In larger companies, many cable companies offer dedicated fiber data connections as a better alternative to bonded T's. Using a Fax machine with a VoIP provider is not recommended. Most companies choose to utilize fax via the Internet software to eliminate the need for standalone fax machines. Others simply choose to keep an analog line with the local phone company for this purpose. They can often share that fax line with a DSL line to provide a level of phone redundancy heretofore not available. One last consideration is the viability of the company providing the dial tone. After all, AT&T is one of the largest corporations in the world. That is true, but wasn't General Motors right up there with them? I am certain, that anyone who chooses AT&T for their dial tone can sleep well at night knowing that their phones will ring tommorrow. Of course they will be paying a steep premium for that good night's sleep. Many CLEC's have filed for bankruptcy or even gone out of business but no one, I know of, has had their phones shut off because of it. The fact is that the user base of any phone company is its most valuable and liquid asset. It is a very competitive marketplace with other companies standing in the wings waiting to deliver dial tone. With the financial woes that Nortel is experiencing, one should be more concerned over the viability of their phone manufacturer. There is no law requiring parts to be available for any specified length of time. As a matter of fact, a local VoIP provider filed for Chapter 11 in April. I don't know what the future of that company is but the majority of its clients are aware of alternatives that can be switched to without any discontinuation of services. Considering today's economy, one of the simplest ways to influx some cash into a business is to trim operating expenses. Having your phone bills checked is an easy way to start. I am more than willing to answer any questions my opinions may create. ...read more
By Business Solutions Advisors October 29, 2009
Voice over IP Truth and Fiction I draw my opinions after running my own IT support and business equipment company for over 25 years.After I sold that company I spent many years in both the IT and Telecommunications arenas. I have been certified to sell Cisco Call Manager and have successfully sold and implemented both premise based and hosted IP telephone solutions to businesses large and small.The term VoIP stands for "Voice over Internet Protocol" and it encompasses a wide spectrum of voice communications solutions. Virtually every phone carrier in the country uses VoIP somewhere in there backbone to reduce the cost of transmitting voice from one point to the other.The telecommunications marketplace has been dominated for decades by the carriers, AT&T;, Southwestern Bell and Windstream etc.; the phone manufacturers; Avaya, Nortel, NEC etc. and the dealers who do the installation and support who refer to themselves as "interconnects."Arguably, the greatest advancement in productivity to take place in this industry was voice mail and that was nearly 2 decades ago.Over that same period of time, Wireless technology (cell phones) has gone frombriefcasesized portable phones with huge batteries that cost several hundred dollars each with extremely expensive minutes that only the most successful executives could afford to free phone with a plethora of features along with very cheap minutes by comparison. They have made pocket size cell phones with cameras, voice mail, text mail and e-mail available to virtually everybody.Business class telephone service, on the other hand, has done little to advance in that same time frame. The "interconnects" business relies upon their customers' need for services. The manufacturers rely on systems that are built to become obsolete so they can keep the factory open. And the carriers continue to gouge their customers even though deregulation was supposed to put an end to that. The truth is that the carriers have a monopoly on all local service in their area and have operated as any monopoly would.When Cisco brought this technology to the forefront at Fortune 1000 companies they explained how companies with multiple locations could bypass their local carrier(s) and talk inter-company over the company's internal network using VoIP. They also were able to route long distance calls using the least cost route through their network. They have dominated that marketplace ever since.This technology turned voice into data and the telecommunications world has not been the same since.Once voice became data, the pace of enhancements parallelled that of the computer world rather than the telecom world. Over the past 10 years reliable VoIP solutions have been implemented in businesses of all sizes replacing the obsolete triumvirate of carrier, Mfg and interconnect.Since voice can now be carried over the Internet, the local phone company can be taken out of the loop. Before VoIP, phone systems were proprietary, limiting your options for repair and replacement. If you wished to change phone switches, you had to buy new phones. That was a good idea for the manufacturer and interconnect but the customer was held captive.So who do companies call to obtain information about VoIP? Typically, they will call the local Interconnect who sold them there last phone system because they have had a long and happy relationship with them. Unfortunately, this is akin to asking the wolf to guard the hen house.Most Interconnects are telecommunications people not IT people, regardless of what they may claim. Replacing an analog phone system with a VoIP system would drastically reduce their revenue stream for service and support. The open architecture of true IP phones eliminates the need for expensive service agreements. Many Interconnects will portend that their "digital" phone systems are IP phones but this is not true. Those digital phones are still proprietary technology running over old phone company architecture. They simply use their proprietary digital technology to connect to the carrier's old wires. They can connect to remote locations using a company's network but, in most instances, that remote location has to buy a separate phone system to operate their phones.When asked, the typical Interconnect will say that VoIP doesn't work, that it is unreliable and that your phones go down when the Internet goes down. That is usually all that someone needs to hear and they spend their good money investing in decades old technology.The truth is that the Internet was created by the Military to provide a more dependable communications infrastructure in the event of a nuclear attack. The Internet does not go down.On the other hand, how many times do you hear radio and TV instructions to call neighboring police and fire departments because their phone lines are down?Of course your link to the Internet could go down. Your router could go bad. Your cable or T1 connection could be cut. However you face the same risk with traditional phone systems. Your phone switch and associated line cards can fail and your phone lines can be cut just as easily if not more.The quality of the voice transmitted over VoIP can be far better than traditional phone solutions. High Definition voice is available for VoIP and it is far clearer than anything available under current telecom technology.There are a host of different solutions that can claim to be VoIP. Premise based IP PBX solutions, like the Cisco solution, can implement VoiP within a company. However, many IP PBX vendors liked the model of the older phone manufacturers and try to keep their solutions proprietary with costly implementation and continuing support costs. There are open-sourc IP PBX solutions available based upon a platform called Asterisk. This Linux based program offers more features than most companies could ever use but, if you are not careful, you may end up without any support options. Make sure if you choose this option that you choose a local company that provides a turn-key supported Asterisk solution,The traditional world of Telecom has offered a solution called Centrex for many years. This option offered the functionality of the phone system from the Carrier which required a smaller investment in phone hardware. However, since it cut into the profits that the Interconnects were making on the hardware it never reached its market potential. Carriers even offered higher commissions on Centrex line to Interconnects. This ended up with clients getting Centrex lines to run their expensive phone systems. Who were the winners here?In the VoIP world there are numerous IP Dial tone providers. These are the people who compete with the Carriers. They bypass the local carrier and typically can save 50% or more on a company's local and long distance. More importantly, they are not governed by the same set of rules as traditional carriers. This means that, in most cases, they can put all of your telephone numbers with one provider. This eliminates the cost of call forwarding numbers from "FX" (foreign exchange numbers) or any cost to inter company calls.So any company who is looking to save money on their phone bills or upgrade old fashioned phone systems with a more productivity enhancing system should, at least, investigate VoIP with an open mind.There are many ways to create appropriate phone solutions. You do not, necessarily, have to replace a perfectly good phone system to take advantage of VoIP. You also do not need to run an IP phone system over a VoIP provider. Speak to someone with expertise that will give you an honest answer and base your decision on the evidence- not claims. ...read more
By Business Solutions Advisors October 22, 2009
After spening weeks, months or even years typing, creating and correcting the perfect manuscript, the next step is to hope for the best case scenario. You’ve put your heart and soul into a manuscript, and now it needs to be published. It would be great to have the manuscript on the shelves of bo... ...read more
Professional printing and graphic design companies can help you get a marketing edge when it comes to your business. A printing company can easily handle all of your needs with business cards, flyers, brochures, and more. The graphic design side will help you create logos and other graphics to make yo... ...read more