A telephone is a requirement of business, even in the age of texting and email. But telephony has branched out and we had to think carefully about our options. Being a young start-up, we didn’t want to overspend or purchase things before we need them. There were three main options for telephony: the traditional landline handset (I’m including wireless handsets utilizing landline base stations), online (Vonage or Skype), or cellular mobile phone.
Traditional landline works great. There is something to be said for stable, reliable service. There is generally a perception of price gouging but it is fairly easy to choose your own long distance provider separately and, locally, we now have a choice of vendor for local service as well.
Online telephony still isn’t 100% reliable and service quality, while at times great, can be less than desirable. Generally the long distance aspects are cheap and you can yak all you want.
Mobility is the strength of cellular. Excluding that, mobile combines the worse of landlines (higher cost) and online (lower reliability).
At Alamazoo, we decided to start with mobile phones as we wanted to have easy access 24/7 to our staff during the early start-up phase. With that in mind, mobiles were a requirement, and the question was whether to have multiple phone systems or not. We chose not to. Our mobile plan provides for unlimited in-bound calling which we think will help to keep the phone bills low. We will probably re-evaluate in 6 months but for now we’re happy with this solution.
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