I'm a manager in a small UK company whose portfolio also includes looking after the company's computers and telecommunications. On a daily basis I am contacted by telecom firms asking me if they can take 'just 10 minutes of my time to save me 60% on my phone bills or similar'. Now these guys are not selling VoIP but something called carrier pre-select. That's when you pay your line rental to one company and pay for your call charges to another, who will charge you at a lower rate than the line rental company.

I have to say these guys are seasoned telesales people. They know every trick in the book to keep you talking, a few haven't even got the hint from my standard line of 'I need to finish this conversation now and hang up the phone'. Anyway to get me a better line to tell these guy's I'd love to be able to say 'we’re on VoIP, and you can't compete with those prices'. However, I can't use that line yet. Why? Because my ISP connection uptime is not reliable enough to switch.

A few weeks ago after a thunderstorm we lost full ADSL connection in one of our branches for three days. Now if that weren’t bad enough to lose e-mail capability and the various web sites crucial to the running of our business, if we had lost phone capability as well then as a recruitment agency we would have lost both business and customers.

This is not the only service outage we have experienced, I would approximate that once a month we can expect to lose service for at least 3 hours in one of our branches. You might suggest that I move to a more reputable supplier, however we are with one of the largest and most well known ISP's in the UK, so we do not really have the option of changing to a different supplier. Until the ISP’s can guarantee a better continuation of service then I shan’t be recommending VoIP to our Managing Director for his business.

© Mike Bromley 2005

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