Are you paying too much for phone service? Are you taking full advantage of all existent telecommunication services? Odds are, your answers are Yes and No. In her new series of articles, Joyce Frazza, Biz4NJ’s telecommunications Expert, will tell you how to reverse those answers, as she did recently for one multi-office trucking firm, saving them thousands each month.
With half a million square feet of warehousing and a fleet of trucks shipping billions of pounds annually across the 48 states, The CTX Group really knows trucking. They have been in the trade for 70 years and kept current, meeting the just-in-time shipping needs that save manufacturing clients huge storage costs. But they really do not know phones. That is why they called in Frazza and her VoycEnterprises team.
Based in Hoboken, CTX sought to connect with a secondary office in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, and a smaller, outpost office in Fairless Hills Pennsylvania. The company needed to connect beyond itself and all its suppliers and vendors. There was also an enormous trucker-to-homebase-and-warehouse traffic.
When Frazza came to CTX, she found 58 POTS lines (Plain Old Telephone Service - one line, only talking, only two people.) handling the outside communications. They also had the three offices linked by a straight point-to-point connection. These dedicated circuit lines were handled by a telecom provider. A voice-over IP set up allowed them talk over the internet and send minimal amounts of data. In short, a whole lot of individuals could communicate with only one other individual at a time.
Among the many problems with this set up was that, like many point-to-point systems, it was mileage sensitive. So even though they had a dedicated connection, every time Hoboken picked up the phone to chat with Langhorne - more than 70 miles away - the dollars were dropping into the provider’s coffers. It was costing CTX Group $1085 a month to link Hoboken and Langhorne, plus another $900 to keep Fairless Hills in the loop. Add to this the $3000 monthly fees for the 58 POTS lines, plus per-minute fees, and CTX was shelling out over $5,500 for communication. Enter VoycEnterprises.
Frazza’s first move was to replace the old point-to-point set up with an MPLS -Multiprotocol Label Switching system. Basically, MPLS is one of the swiftest ways to transfer separate voice and data traffic for selected users over the public internet, keeping the information in its own private tunnel. VoycEnterprises increased the bandwidth to a hefty 3.0 megabytes at the host location (Langhorne.) (A regular T-1 line holds only 1.5 megabytes.) This doubling of the bandwidth and the amount of data which could be sent in any instant, allowed the Fairless Hills to merely link in with Langhorne, thus doing away with that office’s $900 monthly telecom fee.
The 28 POTS lines in Langhorne alone were costing CTX $1550 every month. Frazza upgraded these to a Primary Rate Interface, dropping the cost to $350 monthly. At the same time, the per-minute rate which was running at about 6.5 cents, was cut to a penny and a half. Likewise, Hoboken’s 27 POTS lines were replaced by a PRI system at the same cost, with similar savings.
CTX Group handles hundreds of trucks and thousands of tons of vital goods daily. They’ve got to know where each package is at any time of day, and frequently telephone is the only viable method. To ensure continuity in case of internet crash, VoycEnterprises built in back ups at the offices in Hoboken, Langhorne, and in the fourth, most remote office in Boston. Each of these offices have three additional POTS lines and a DSL, just in case a back hoe digs through a cable and causes a fiber cut.
To sum up the savings, Langhorne’s previous $4,092 monthly bill dropped to a mere $1,780. Hoboken’s $1,450 got slimmed down by more than $100. And Fairless Hills was linked in through Langhorne’s own MPLS. Per-minute rates dropped to 25 percent of the previous 6.5 cents.
Service is boosted overall. With a doubling of the data pipeline, more information could be sent faster. Additionally, more people will very soon have more individual lines both between offices and outside. Conferencing capabilities will become greater and easier.
For the CTX Group, there was very little not to love about VoycEnterprises proposal and they jumped at it. As this article is being written they are ripping out all the old systems and having VoycEnterprises’ contractors install the new. Frazza points out that CTX’s case is surprisingly common. After all, in the world of telecommunications, newer is frequently cheaper, and older is not necessarily better. Biz4
Joyce Frazza, ever the creative entrepreneur, stepped into the realms of telecom 15 years ago and has run in the forefront ever since. A native of Vailsburg, Frazza graduated from Irvington High School in 1981, and within two years was married and raising her first child. She operated a successful pizzeria, ran a surprisingly lucrative balloon decorating business, and always had a new venture up her sleeve. In 1995, she joined Total Tel based in Little Falls, which later became Covista Communications. She soon became sales support director with a staff of 12. Over the next years she directed sales for Spectrocel, Future Telecom, and Carrier - firms she would later employ when she made her first founding of VoycEnterprises in 2004.
