One of my regular customers asked me if I could stop by on Friday morning to have a word with a salesman about phone service.
What was he pushing initially? Yep, trying to sign them up to go totally VoIP. The sales patter just kept rolling out as he emphasized "moving forward by going digital" over and over.
I asked him if he could guarantee quality of service with VoIP. Apparently, yes! :rolleyes: I quizzed him further. It seems his company is installing dedicated fiber links
just for VoIP between its centers, so they can regulate traffic to maintain quality. That may or may not be true, I don't know, but it's of little significance since this company's nearest plant is miles away.
I asked him how that guaranteed service worked after the traffic left his company's network and encountered all the usual contention issues on the net out to our rural neck of the woods. I pointed out that there was no way he could guarantee a maximum packet transit time through parts of the network his company did not control. I'm not even quite sure he understood what I was talking about.
After a few more attempts with the usual sales bluff, I told him flat out that there is no way I'm going to recommend that the business goes over to VoIP as its sole telephone service. Calls which will "probably be O.K. most of the time" just ain't good enough.
Clearly deciding that he wasn't going to get a VoIP sale, he then started in on ISDN and multi-voice channels, a complex equipment lease-purchase scheme, and a call package which while offering reduced rates on the calls themselves would leave them no better off than they are now. In fact as we've just managed to get an extra 25% discount on all calls from BT for volume, they'd probably have been worse off.
We're talking about a backstreet store in a small town here, which at the moment has two POTS lines, one with DSL. The place seldom has more than two people working in there at a time, sometimes only one.
The final kicker was that his company could completely take over the existing two analog lines, again with a complicated equipment lease package to "move them forward" with modern equipment. One of the partners in the company jumped in at this point and asked about repair, how quickly engineers could come out for line faults etc.
I know what the answer
should have been, but according to the salesman they have engineers all over the country ready to pounce at a moment's notice who deal with all faults themselves.
Wrong! In this backwoods part of Norfolk all the local loops and C.O. plant is still entirely owned by BT. Any other company "taking over" a line really does so in name and accounting only, since faults have to be reported to BT's relatively new OpenReach division for action.
I don't have to tell you my recommendation, do I?
Originally posted by EV607797:
In my area, we are paying about 30% in local, state and federal taxes for a land line.
Over here the only
visible tax which is added to the bill is 17.5% VAT (sales tax). Of course, the phone companies have so many license fees and other taxes to pay that they just increase the basic rates to cover them.
So while the U.K. system makes it
look cheaper with just the one tax, I can't help feeling that the U.S. billing with the taxes broken down gives a better indication of where all the money is going.
As I've said about the cost of gasoline over here, if everybody was handed a bill which said "Fuel £2.50, tax £7.50" it would open a few eyes (and those proportions are about right).
Please deposit twenty five cents for the next three minutes...
(Sorry, I didn't have any quarters!
)
