My opinion, which I have not been successful in putting into practice, is the
key is not giving away labor like training, configuration, setting up IVRs and
MOH, etc. There’s a lot of ongoing changes to a phone system, traditionally a
small business would pay the “phone guy” several hundred dollars every other
month, now their office manager does it or they pay you (or get you to do it
for free).
Also not to compare AT&T or Comcast putting in an appliance to a hosted system
with support of branches and offsite employees, FW upgrades, backups, HW
replacement in case of failure, etc.
And I thought companies like AT&T and Comcast still went by the per-line model
where you could end up paying for 6 lines in a rollover group to handle enough
simultaneous calls where with VoIP you just need the one DID.
From: Joe Falaschi
Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2015 8:04 AM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] VoIP
Yea I told the ipifony guys that we cannot charge what their payback model said
to for business lines - something like $35 per handset. We just couldn't pay
back their system with the rates we have to charge. We still charge per
handset, but more around $18 each with all features. We definitely think it's
worth doing VoIP though. It makes selling business Internet much easier for us
to be able to offer a package. Even as you say 10 extensions at $18 per, $180
plus the Internet. Maybe it's more than Comcast when you add the Internet but
it's much more in the ballpark than if the handsets were double. We're just
starting to keep better track of stuff like this but we're at about 50% of
business accounts wanting bundled voice and the competition's quote has it so
ours has to as well.
Joe Falaschi
e-vergent
On 4/6/15 10:31 PM, George Skorup (Cyber Broadcasting) wrote:
The per extension model doesn't work anymore, as far as business customers.
Say they have 10 phones/extensions at $35/mo each. Comcast or AT&T can come in
and blow that away with $200/mo business service. Been there, done that, cannot
do that anymore.
Don't think you can just jump into doing voice. IMO, it's not worth it at
all. Too many headaches. For your own business, sure, have at it.
On 4/6/2015 9:33 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
You’ve got to charge for something. It has become standard practice not to
charge for minutes, even though you get charged for minutes. So some
combination of $X per DID and $Y per extension. Especially when you are
talking to businesses, they are used to paying per “line”, where if they want
to be able to have Z simultaneous incoming or outgoing calls, they need Z
lines, usually each with its own DID but configured as a rollover or hunt group
to the main number. But with VoIP you can have as many calls as you want with
just one “line”, so you need a different model. Also, features like voicemail
and call waiting and caller ID that used to bring in tons of money for the
phone companies are now expected free as part of standard service. So you need
to charge for something. Otherwise you end up supporting 20 or 100 handsets
with unlimited local and long distance for a total of $20 per month and you go
broke. I think the idea is that an extension is a placeholder for a bucket of
minutes, if a business or MDU has 100 extensions, they will likely make 100
times as many calls as someone with one extension. On the other hand, a
business with 1 DID and 100 extensions probably shouldn’t pay as much as 100
individual customers each with an extensions and a DID, especially since you
will probably pay some small amount per month per DID for origination.
