Introducing our Communication Services|Internet & Telephony

We are pleased to announce that we are now able to provide communication services in the form of Internet / Leased Lines and Telephony.

Why now?

We have been providing these services for some time now to existing clients, so this isn’t a new offering, but we haven’t up until now advertised these services within our offering.

With our core business supplying IT Managed Services to Businesses and supporting customers entire IT infrastructure, we always step in to assist and communicate with third party suppliers.  We do this to help resolve issues or assist with upgrades where necessary.

Working with third Parties is a value add to our Managed Services offering, as it alleviates workload on business owners or managers trying to resolve issues they may not have knowledge on e.g. a telephone issue may require communicating and troubleshooting with the third party provider to rule in or out an issue.  We would generally speak to the 3rd party supplier on the clients behalf in order to speed up resolution for our customer through our technical knowledge and understanding of our customers IT estate.

Whilst the dealing with third party providers will not change where necessary for our clients, removing the requirement for third party interaction and single point of contact for IT Support, Internet and Telephones will simplify the process for businesses.  Additionally we are often asked to provide Internet Connectivity and Telephony to our existing clients and any new opportunities.  So now, ultimately through popular demand, we are adding these services to our offerings.

What Communication Services can we provide?

We spent a lot of time looking at and trialing different solutions and reviewing different providers to work with to be able to offer the best options for our customers.

Internet and Leased Lines

Internet is a core service to most businesses, so we are now in a position to be able to offer various internet connectivity options to clients, from FTTC and FTTP to Leased Lines.  All are subject to availability at the required address, but we can provide available options based on address.  More information on Internet and Leased Line options can be found here

Telephony

We have spent a lot of time trialing different telephony systems to check on stability, functionality and features.  We generally work on the basis of determining whether we would use a product or solution ourselves as a measure to identify solutions to offer to our customers.

We have identified two separate telephone solutions to offer customers dependent on their requirements and current systems in use.

Microsoft Teams Phone System with Direct Routing and 3CX.

Microsoft Teams Phone

Using Microsoft Teams for telephony within an organisation that already uses Microsoft 365 is a great option.  We often look at how businesses communicate internally and externally and having a single pane of glass approach to communicating.  Using Microsoft Teams for instant messaging, group chat, video conferencing, file collaboration etc… adding Landline Telephony just makes sense.  Too many communication platforms leaves you open to missing something, so adding an additional common communication method to a single app minimises this risk.

A lot of users will already have the Microsoft Teams app on phones and tablets, so adding the telephony piece to the system behind the scenes will allow the making and receiving of landline calls through the Microsoft Teams app without any user reconfiguration.

As mentioned, we wouldn’t recommend a product to a customer that we wouldn’t use ourselves, so we are now happily using this platform for our landline telephony and “Practice what we Preach”.

Find out more about Microsoft Teams Phone.

3CX

3CX is a second option for telephony we would recommend to clients.  3CX is a standalone system with many integrations (including integrating to Teams as an SBC) and offers a huge amount of features and configurations.  With the licensing based on concurrent calling, this solution may offer better pricing for larger organisations vs Microsoft Teams based on this aspect.  3CX does require hosting of the PBX so there is an expense on this basis.  3CX offers a mobile app at no extra charge so mobility and remote working is a good feature just like Teams.

We like 3CX and was using it internally until recently when we moved to the Microsoft Teams Phone solution, in summary we wanted the single pane of glass approach discussed above, however would still recommend the solution in certain environments whether based on size or in the event the customer isn’t using Microsoft 365 services.

Please get in touch if you have any enquiries or would like pricing / availability on any of our Communication Services.