We started Opticom Consulting in 2003 to provide Telecom Consulting services to small and medium-sized businesses and nonprofits. It’s a living, but to be perfectly honest, putting ourselves between angry customers and unhelpful customer service reps can be a pretty thankless job at times. So it really helps to have a little extra motivation. In that vein, one of the things that drives us is giving our clients the information and the help that they need to push back a little on the giant telecom companies. It’s not a fair fight, and it is clearly in the carriers’ interest to keep clients in the dark, so it makes us feel good to know that our clients are better off when we can provide them with a little education.
In nearly 12 years of helping clients, we have run into some of the same questions over and over again – you know, frequently asked questions. We do address some of these on our Frequently Asked Questions page and our Video FAQ page, but we thought it might be a good idea to address some of these topics in a series of posts. We decided to call the series “Telecom Tip Tuesdays” because we liked the name and because it gives us a great incentive to get one out every week.
Some of the topics we have planned are:
- What is using all of my mobile data? This is a question that we hear all the time – usually in a tone of surprise and anger – because a client just looked at his or her cell phone bill and noticed BIG overage charges for data. As smartphones become more useful for your organization, keeping control of your data usage has become a lot more important.
- How do I manage my mobile data usage? Now that we’ve given you a list of the biggest data hogs, we thought we should write something about what you can do about it. Since most wireless plans are now data-centric, this is some real money-saving advice.
- Is Cable or FiOS a better choice for me? Most small and medium-sized businesses can handle their data needs using either a cable connection (Comcast or Time Warner) or Verizon’s FiOS product. They are priced in the same ballpark, but they have advantages and disadvantages with respect to each other, so we will lay out the differences and how to make a choice.
- What is VoIP and do I need it? This is the topic of our most popular video (16,000+ views) and one of the more common questions we get, so it’s clearly on a lot or organizations’ radars. The telecom providers spend a lot of money marketing Voice over IP (VoIP) and it can be helpful, but it’s not the solution to all of your problems – and it comes with some trade-offs as well.
That’s just a sample of what we are planning to cover, but rather than make this just a forum for us to ramble on about some random topic, we want to know if you have a question that you’d like us to answer. Telecom touches every aspect of your organization and if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last 12 years, there are a LOT of frustrations with Telecom services and providers. So if you have a burning question about Telecom (Voice, Data, Internet Cellular, etc), just enter it here:
[formidable id=7 title=true description=true]
Also, we are planning to release these Telecom Tip Tuesday posts in a newsletter once a month, so if you are interested in reading these in a monthly email summary, you can sign up here:
[enewsletter_subscribe show_name="1" show_groups="0" subscribe_to_groups="5"]
If you read all the way down to here, thank you! Please stay tuned for more posts in our Telecom Tip Tuesdays series! We’re already working on the next one – What is using all of my mobile data?