The business had no need for high-speed Internet access, so it had taken the
cheapest option: dial-up. But while the service itself was cheap, when Vision
Telecom analyzed the company’s whole telecommunications package, it found that
in fact, the customer was paying a premium for its slow Internet access.
It showed up on the phone bill: 15,850 minutes a month, the overwhelming majority to the ISP’s dial-up number. By Vision’s calculations, the company was paying more than $250 a month to check its e-mail and surf the Web – very slowly.
An agent proposed an alternative, using MetTel, a Verizon reseller active throughout the East Coast. With the same set of services, but the dial-up replaced with a $69.95 DSL line, the customer could save $230 a month. After the initial $295 DSL setup fee, the company could save more than $2,100 in the first year.
Rhode Island's Market Has Changed. Developers, Builders, Investors and Sellers Must Change With It.
By Emilio DiSpirito IV License Partner | Engel & Völkers Oceanside Leader | The DiSpirito…
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This is Vision Telecom’s bread and butter: Analyzing small- and mid-sized businesses’ needs and finding suitable telecom services – whether it’s a package from, say, MetTel, or a combination of three or four providers to cover local and long-distance phone service, the Internet and data storage.
The Providence startup’s business model is not unique, though most of Vision Telecom’s competitors are in Massachusetts, not Rhode Island. And with companies facing an overwhelming array of choices for every kind of telecom service, there’s clearly a market for experts willing to sort through it all.
“If you’re running a business and you’re getting calls from different companies, you don’t know who to believe,” said Doug Stephenson, vice president of Vision Telecom and a longtime Verizon agent before starting this company. “We’ve partnered with every provider that we felt could fill a niche for our customers.”
Vision doesn’t deal with the thousands, of course – it’s narrowed it down to about 20 providers, including giants such as Verizon, AT&T and MCI; large but less-familiar names such as Qwest and Conversent; resellers such as MetTel and ZoneCMS, and specialists such as Genesys Conferencing and VaultLogix, for offsite data storage. (Vision doesn’t do business with Cox Communications, favoring companies focused entirely on telecom – “Cox is a cable company first,” Stephenson said.)
President Jeff Swider likens Vision Telecom’s role to that of an insurance agent: Take a business, analyze its needs, and connect it to the most suitable providers. As new options come along, or the business’s needs change, adapt accordingly, so the customer is always getting the best and most cost-effective package.
Many companies don’t keep up with the marketplace, Swider and Stephenson said, and it can cost them big money. “We recently came across a company that was paying 80 cents a minute for long-distance,” Swider said, spending about $2,000 a month for what they could get for $100. The old, super-expensive plans are still out there, he said, and “there’s still a tremendous amount of disparity” between good and bad deals.
Sometimes, Stephenson said, a company can save without even switching providers, but just by ensuring it’s getting the best deal that provider can offer. Businesses also fall into the trap of getting too much, Swider said: too many phone lines, or a dedicated T1 Internet connection when the far-cheaper DSL would do.
Cost is not, however, the only thing that Vision Telecom encourages its customers to look at. Not all networks are created equal, Swider and Stephenson said, some are more reliable than others, and sometimes they’ll offer several options to a single business, from the cheapest package to the sturdiest network.
For many customers, Vision Telecom also recommends some “redundancy”: another way to route the 800-line or access the Internet, a second T1 connection to ensure the Web site is never down. Even businesses with limited online activity can have a real problem if the e-mail system is down for a while, Swider and Stephenson noted, and for some companies, an outage can mean thousands of dollars in lost business.
For DSL users, Vision often recommends a couple of dial-up accounts for emergencies, Stephenson said. For a telecommunications-based company, a bigger investment is in order, such as the setup they came up with for their next-door neighbor, Business Link International: a wireless T1 to supplement the main T1 connection, and a special gadget that combines the two lines so network access is never disrupted.
Such a backup isn’t cheap, but for Business Link, which does large-scale e-mail
and fax broadcasting, it’s still a money-saver, Swider said. “That was a big
deal to them, because they were going down maybe once a quarter, for an hour
at a time, and it was costing them a lot.”
