1. What is the contention ratio of the line – i.e. how many are sharing it? 2. How many network outages have you had in past 12 months? 3. What router is supplied? There have been regular incidents of cheaper routers being hacked or compromised. If someone is charging £10 a month for broadband and giving you a free router it won’t be worth much 4. What is average wait time when calling for support? 5. What is average fix time for faults? 6. What network is it on? This is important if you want to change providers at a later date. We see a number of suppliers moving services from BT to Talk Talk without telling the customer. It can be quite hard to move back. There is more choice of suppliers if you are on BT. The main question, however, is to ask yourself what a day without internet would cost you, and does this provider increase the risk? We saw a pub that went for cheaper broadband which then went down on a Friday and was not fixed until the Monday. The pub lost £6,000 in takings over the weekend as their card machines were linked to the Internet. Lines There are several telecoms companies that advertise themselves as ‘never beaten on price’ – they can’t all be right unless they are operating as a cartel. Frequently the claim links only to line rentals or calls to a specific destination. We have seen lines being sold at below the wholesale price, so, short of wanting to go out of business quickly the supplier will be clawing it back elsewhere. So be wary and check the points above, plus check the following: 1. The price is fixed for duration of the contract 2. No set up fees or minimum charges on calls - in the last few weeks we have seen a hotel in Norfolk and a care home in Lancashire being charged 26p set up fee on each and every call 3. Calls rounded up to the nearest minute – this can add 25% to the overall cost of calls 4. Prices to destinations you call regularly – are they competitive? 5. Special promotions – a London charity was being offered free intra-site calls but then being charge five-times the market price for all other UK landline calls. Mobiles With mobiles the obvious thing to check is coverage for your location. There is no point signing a cheap deal if there is no signal at your office/business location. You should not rely on the networks checking either. We saw a company where the head office had coverage but their two regional offices didn’t - but the network still happily signed them up. It is not just office locations – check key staff home addresses as well if you are changing networks. Some deals appear cheaper because they offer unlimited calls and lots of data but many companies don’t need them. Around a third of all mobile users no longer make any voice calls. The average business person uses well under 2GB of data each month. One customer we reviewed found that 10% of their 1,000 phones had not been used at all in a year. So, check what you actually need before asking for prices - not just who can do the best deal on unlimited data. Watch also for inflated hardware funds if you are not going SIM only. We’ve seen companies signed up to deals where the funds looked impressive only to find the cost of the actual handsets provided was inflated to 25-35% above normal prices. If you are going for a hardware fund ask for a hardware price list at the same time.
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