sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information SALES

Anyone running into CLEC'S offering phone systems as part of a bundled package. Seems to be happening more often now. We touch base with customers offering upgrades, etc. and find out they switched dialtone providers (CLEC) and "got new phones" as part of the package. Not sure if others are seeing this more and more often. Now the CLECs who we might be a reseller for are competition. The price gets stuffed in the monthly billing package, which I'm sure they are paying a premium for, but contracts are signed and they are usually happy to have new phones under the pretense of getting them for free....

Pretty much only Paetec..."equipment for services"

Steve

delta com is doing it around here

In NJ Paetec & Broadview (ATX) are pushing their Hosted PBX with their T1's

I read Embarq were going to start selling a Hosted system to SMB also.....

I think that you are probably seeing hosted IP equipment since the phones are cheap and the monthly cost is reasonable. I seriously doubt that they are providing true systems.

We are seeing the opposite in this market. CLECs are sending us leads for system sales. One of them is actually offering to finance the purchase price of our system and roll the monthly payment into their phone bill.

We all know how happy the customer will be with their Hosted service in a month or two. I see it as when the Bell companies were offering their CENTREX/ESSEX services as a solution for buying a whole new system. How well is that going these days.

We see that once in a while from some of the local CLECs but mostly its the LECs who get us. They customer gets a free or reduced cost phone system to where their basically giving it away at cost and no one else can compete.

DeltaCom came came to us (we're an End-User) offering an NEC system packaged into the monthly bill. One problem I see is if the SLA is not good, you're still stuck with the phones. If you don't like the phones, you're still stuck with them!

The CLEC that I do contract work for, from what I can tell, doesn't do this. They prefer hands off with the telephone systems and prefer the customer take care of that end. However, the CLEC does sell VoIP lines to business customers.

We were getting leads from TDS Metrocom for new equip, but I lost a customer last week to them. They sold the customer a IP managed system and GAVE them free IP telephones to use. We were going to quote a new system for their new building.