Slash Communication Costs

Old-style PBX telephone systems can cost tens of thousands of dollars up front, never mind the expense of ongoing management and maintenance. Adding capacity is notoriously painful.

That's why Robert Musor, VP of worldwide sales at Viaquo in San Jose, wanted a system that would see his 30-person data security startup through its next growth spurt. Rather than spend $40,000 to upgrade the existing PBX, Musor chose Sylantro's Voice-over-IP (VoIP) system, serviced by GoBeam. It combines the telephony features of a PBX with a self-service Web interface that provides access to contact lists, voice mail, call logs, six-way conferencing, and configuration tools. Setup is easy and costs $50 per handset. As with wireless phone service, you purchase blocks of local and long-distance minutes each month. Adding, deleting, and changing user profiles is done quickly and easily via a Web interface.

"Sylantro and GoBeam offered a complete solution: They provide the phones, they handle our local and long distance, we pay only for the minutes we use, and we don't own any capital hardware," says Musor. "We anticipate this system will serve our needs for at least the next couple of years."

If you would rather not replace existing phones but still want to take advantage of IP telephony rates, Net2Phone's IP Phone and Max T1/E1 Router offer a worthy alternative. Just by connecting a small switching device to your DSL or T1 broadband connection, you can route long-distance calls over Net2Phone's private Internet network. You'll pay $1,895 for the eight-line DSL router or $5,000 for the 16-line T1 router, but calls over the IP network cost 30 to 70 percent less than typical carrier fees. For Rick Waters, CEO of Webcast 1, a 35-person Web design and marketing company in Boca Raton, Florida, that means a $2,000 discount each month.

As workforces become more mobile, businesses are turning to virtual private networks (VPNs) to provide secure, password-protected access to corporate networks over the Internet. VPNs eliminate the need for private dial-in accounts or a physical network between corporate locations, but in traditional VPN setups, installing and maintaining hardware and software become the responsibility of your IT department—and you're often stuck buying all your bandwidth from the same place.

With OpenReach, software, not hardware, transforms any computer into a VPN appliance—no new broadband connections or network equipment is necessary. The cost of the service is based on your Internet connection speed. For a 512Kbps connection you'll pay $235 per month, less for dial-up, more for T1.

For ArQule, which designs and synthesizes molecules for pharmaceutical and biotech companies, installing a point-to-point firewall VPN would have required an expensive network overhaul and taken as long as three months to set up. So Noel Amogawin, network operations manager, instead set up an OpenReach VPN between ArQule's Woburn, Massachusetts, location and its Menlo Park, California, office. It took less than a week, and Amogawin didn't spend a dime on new network resources.

from an article in PC Magazine