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Posts Tagged ‘phone’

As supervisor of a large company, one of my greatest concerns is to limit expenses as much as possible to ensure further company success. It remains a constant part of my job responsibility to lower costs and always be thinking of cost-effective ways to continue business in my department. After my boss purchased a complete new phone system, I decided that we should sell our old AT&T equipment back to the company we purchased the new one from.

Coming up with effective ways to begin back money within your company can add future financial success to your company. This innovative way of thinking will make you more valuable to your company. Ultimately, encouraging the owner or whomever is in charge of expenses, to continue to invest in more equipment that will not only help you but other employees.
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3 Mobile have teamed up with Skype to offer free calls across the Internet using their new Skypephone. The Skype network has, within a very short space of time, become hugely popular for making free Internet calls through handsets that are attached to your PC and has built up a large customer base that recently prompted a buyout by eBay. If popular, this brave step by 3 could prompt an end of pay as you talk tariffs and push other mobile phone networks into action to try and offer similar competitive deals.

The new Skypephone from 3 has all the functionality you would expect from a modern day mobile phone including 3G, a 2-megapixel camera, mp3 player, mobile TV and internet plus the handset looks stylish and comes in either black or white with pink or blue trims. The Skypephone includes 16MB internal memory and comes with a 256MB micro SD memory card which is also expandable up to 1GB. The large Skype button in the center of the handset allows for quick and easy access to the Skype menu where you can simply make a free call or write a text message to people within your friends list.

The biggest challenge for the 3 Skypephone is encouraging people who are not already signed up with Skype, or whose friends are not members of Skype, to buy the phone. If this hurdle can be cleared then it could create a domino effect which would push all other mobile phone networks to provide a similar service and may make Skype a major player in the world of telecommunications. Once you are signed up to Skype you will not only be able to call people using the 3 Skypephone but also talk to friends connected to Skype through their PC.

3 Mobile offer the Skypephone on either pay as you go or monthly contract deals. The payg deal currently costs £49.99 for the Skypephone handset and requires you to top up your phone with at least £10 credit for standard voice calls and texts. The contract deals start from £12 per month with a minimum tie-in of 18 months.
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I recently replaced the business phone systems in the company I own to accommodate the needs of my staff. I wish I could say that it was to accommodate the needs of our customers, but sadly, that isn’t the case. You see, our old phone system had many more extensions than we had lines for. It was built with the assumption that inter-office communications would be utilized more than incoming and outgoing calls. Since my company deals primarily with internet business and doesn’t do much in the way of transactions over the phone, the system I put in place in the late 90′s had served us well until very recently. As of late, I have had vendors who had traditionally reached me by phone sending me e-mails. They were complaining that it’s often impossible to get through to me. I looked into the matter and this is what I found… Most of my employees were spending a great deal of time talking on the phone. They weren’t talking to vendors, customers, service providers or other business entities. Instead, they were utilizing the phone for personal reasons.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the type of boss who thinks it’s never acceptable to talk on the phone. I understand that during the workday, things are inevitably bound to come up which require an employees’ attention. We’ve all been there. Perhaps a child is sick or the car is in the shop needing repairs. I understand that these things often require time spent on the phone. Judging from the traffic on my lines and the astronomical phone bills I was receiving, however, this was way beyond what I think any employer would consider acceptable. Read the rest of this entry »

Cabling your home for computer network – still a requirement?

With proliferation of wireless networking and communication equipment it is oh-so-tempting to cut the cord and save a significant sum of money in the process. But is everything that a regular computer networking user needs can be done using just wireless network? Let’s take a look at some pros and contras:

1. One important advantage of having a cabled network is the available bandwidth or simply speed. At the present point in time the speed of connection via a simple and inexpensive CAT5E cable can be 1000Mbit/sec, whereas the best that IEEE802.11g (one of the many flavors of Wi-Fi) can offer is only 54Mbit/sec. It may not seem so significant if you think you are only browsing Internet, and the DSL speed available to you is 1.5Mbit/sec. However, if you need to print via your network connection on a remote printer, you should realize that the print jobs, depending on the amount of graphic data in them, can easily reach dozens and even hundreds megabytes. Since 1Byte=8bit one 100MByte print job will take 15 seconds (and in reality this time can be much longer) to transmit via a Wi-Fi wireless connection, and this time shrinks to mere 1 sec or less on wired 1000MBit/s Ethernet connection. Same principal applies to transferring files, backing up files on other computers in the network etc.
2. It is not possible today and with all probability will not be possible in the future to transmit power needed for your networking device via the wireless link. Unless, of course, you would be willing to be subjected to very high levels of microwave radiation. Thus a device that was marketed to you as “un-tethered” will in fact be very much tethered via the power cord or will have to be re-charged every so often. The power requirements are increasingly important for devices that are expected to be always online, such as phone sets. Therefore it is best to have it connected via a cable that can deliver both power and the communication signal at the same time.
3. Wireless communications are very much proprietary and require whole gamut of conversion equipment to transmit multi-media signals. The same CAT5E cable can without any modification support phone, computer network, balanced line level audio signal, baseband video signal as well as host of other, more specialized, control applications’ signals. With inexpensive adapters called “baluns” the same cable can carry significant number of channels of broadband television or carry a baseband video, such as security camera output, through great distances. All of those applications, except the computer network of course, will require specialized expensive conversion equipment if they needed to be transmitted via a Wi-Fi link.
4. The cost benefit of not running wires around the house is not as simple as issue as it seems. Having installed a wireless network at home you have only eliminated the need to wire for a single application – computer network. A modern home, however, requires all kinds of wiring to run even without regard to computers. The power and phones are obvious examples, as well as thermostats and security systems. Pre-wired speakers are common and most homes today have intercom systems as a desirable option, and those also require extensive wiring. It is very likely that the same contractor running the intercom or security cables is qualified to run computer cables – CAT5E or better. If you are building a home, you should definitely check if computer cabling option is available in your new home, and our advice is to go ahead and purchase it before the walls close. It is going to be a pretty involved and expensive procedure to install the cables later. As an added cost benefit of a wired computer network you will find that all modern computers ship with wired Ethernet network interface card included, and the latest models ship with 1000MBit/sec cards that are essentially free for the computer’s owner.
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