So, you want to know why you need to know this information?

Well, we have consulted with hundreds of businesses to understand their main criteria when comparing Telephone Systems. We’ve tried our best to describe why we believe each point is valid.

• Is an Operator or Reseller? – Simply put, the Operator is licensed by the regulator in South Africa, ICASA. An Operator has the direct interconnect agreements with all the other telephony carriers, and owns and manages the infrastructure in totality. There is significant investment and responsibility, and the cost of operating and managing a network is significant. For Resellers, they leverage the infrastructure from these Operators. They may or may not do their own billing, however the are an agent/dealer/reseller and would typically sell what the Operator has to offer, including issuing the phone numbers of the Operator as the Reseller would not be allocated numbers directly by ICASA. Resellers often bring the flexibility and agility that larger networks struggle providing, however, Resellers have no control over the network and therefore will not provide direct support.
• Call Packages and Rates – When it comes to calling packages, there are typically two cost elements – fixed and variable. The fixed costs related to any service subscription fees, which would be payable irrespective of whether a call is made. This fee may be used to cover the fixed costs for running the service. On the variable side, this relates to call usage. Although some providers have different rates, you should consider the cost to call any other network (and there are many), as well as the billing methodology, for example, some providers may bill on a pure per-second basis, whereas some may charge a connection fee and then bill every few seconds. In this case, if your call is only 2 seconds, you will be charged for the full connection fee.
• Setup Fee – It is important to ask your provider what it is going to cost to join their network. That may be for service activation, installation, training, any hardware required, and more.
• Keep your number – If you intend on moving your Telephone service over to another provider, the last thing you may want to do is change all your Telephone numbers. You need to monitor the regulation as some numbers cannot be ported between providers. At the time of writing this content, you are only allowed to port geographic numbers, such as 011-012, etc. Numbers you cannot port include non-geographic such as 087 0800, 086, etc. If your provider says that they can port these numbers, be sure to ask and get in writing that you will not incur any additional costs in running that service, for example, additional call forwarding fees.
• Use existing PABX – Great! You want all the benefit of VoIP but you want to retain your investment in your current Telephone System. Will it work? Well, that would depend on the Telephone System you use, and what you provider prefers to support. A typical solution involves “IP enabling” a legacy system by using a VoIP Gateway, or most Telephone systems today do support what they call SIP Trunks which doesn’t require any physical hardware outside of the Telephone System to integrate VoIP calling services.
• Contract Term – Get to know how long you are committed for, and what your notice period would be – check your contract terms and conditions and be 100% sure of the automatic contract renewal terms of cancellation fees.
• User your own Internet? – Sure, VoIP requires Internet, but if the Provider for your VoIP is not the same as your Internet, you may sit with a fair bit of risk when there are issues. Resolving issues will require both parties to work together to iron out where the issues may be – I am sure you can appreciate how this process typically goes… If you have one provider, the benefit is that the provider can monitor and manage the full connection from end-to-end, and also to a large degree guarantee the call quality, which is very important to any business.
• Support – You need to have this discussion with your Partner. Is there an SLA? Will that give you a guaranteed support response? Does it include all the fees, including callouts? All of these are valuable questions you need to ask, and keep a record of at your office!

Have we missed something? Let us know what you feel is important to you in the comments below and we’ll work on incorporating it into our Comparison!