Office administrators open their monthly phone bills with trembling fingers. But there are ways to keep telecoms costs within budget.
Here are 10 ways to keep a cap on your phone bill.
Tip one: don't pay by the second for Internet access
The savings to be gained from services such as ISDN and satellite dish Internet access are deceptive because users receive a phone bill for time spent online, on top of a monthly subscription.
Businesses wanting to pay a fixed monthly rental rather than for time online now have an alternative to Telkom's Diginet in the form of Sentech's MyWireless and Telkom's ADSL products. There are three options to MyWireless - the faster the service, the more expensive it is.
Tip two: avoiding e-mail attachments is good netiquette and saves money
The generation of corporate employees who have grown up on MS Office and never paid their own networking costs are the bane of today's online world. A short message that someone net savvy will send as a text file, will be sent as an MS Word attachment, an Excel spreadsheet or a Powerpoint presentation by someone less technically aware. These attachments also waste time and money because they are the main culprits in the spread of e-mail viruses.
Tip three: use data compression if you have to e-mail attachments
The Zip program makes attachments roughly half their size. Many browsers support it automatically, if compression is selected in their preference dialog.
Tip four: install a PABX that supports least-cost routing
The business community had reason to celebrate last year when the Pretoria High Court ruled that it was legal for companies to use PABXs that placed calls directly to the destination network, or made calls to a network from the same network, and get billed at the lower rates.
Tip five: use Wi-Fi to save local area network cabling costs
October saw the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) rule that no licence would be required to operate a Wi-Fi local area network provided it was limited to the owner's premises. Many coffee shops and restaurants are now investing in Wi-Fi hotspots. This will make it easier for sales representatives with Wi-Fi-enabled laptops to correspond with the office between sales calls.
Tip six: install a proxy server
If many people in your organisation read the same web trade journals every day, a proxy server, whereby the web content travels down the outside line only once, may save money.
Tip seven: subscribe for voice mail rather than a second line
ISDN enables a single phone number to double as a voice and data line.
Tip eight: cellphones are also pagers
An SMS message is often cheaper and less obtrusive and than a voice call.
Tip nine: do your Web research outside of office hours
Telkom's evening rates are nearly a third of its office-hour rates. It also offers the option of subscribing to a service that caps the cost of evening and weekend calls at R7.
Tip 10: switch from PDF to HTML
Online content that is saved as PDF, MS Word or Powerpoint attachments designed for printing rather than reading with a browser wastes money because of the costs involved in downloading it.
