Telecoms providers: Business phone and broadband deals bringing more to the corporate customer
As workforce, data and communication needs grow, small companies should start thinking about switching to enterprise-specific business phone and broadband deals.
Bringing many benefits over consumer plans, these packages include several features to increase productivity and ensure smooth, secure communications. Many providers are on the market with a wide range of available plans.
I) Business phone deals
Business phone packages take full advantage of voice-over-IP technologies, and are available from a wide range of providers.
1) Benefits
Modern business phone deals include the best of today’s communication technologies and bring in the convenience of a sole point of contact to get the airtime, hardware, installation and support.
- As many lines -and numbers- as needed: with a business plan, companies can order as many different lines as needed, with all matching phones and network components installed. This can be used to manage customer enquiries, divert communication to individual departments or offices.
- Business phone numbers: besides geographical numbers, carriers will also provide 08 numbers to businesses so that they can operate their business nationwide or even earn money from phone services.
- Dedicated, trained support: a major annoyance with consumer phone plans
Priority support - Business phone providers understand the importance of a working phone line to your company, so they’ll respond as quickly as possible to any technical issues.
2) Providers
Apart from the pure players, major carriers usually have a specific division to deal with corporate customers.
Notable players include:
- Orange Business Services UK;
- Vodafone and their Vodafone business account;
- BT;
- Virgin Media;
- O2;
- And many, many pure players.
II) Broadband deals
Although most phone carriers will double-up as internet services providers for their corporate customers, getting the best business phone and broadband deals to match special needs may require dealing with separate providers. This flexibility can also ensure companies get the best broadband technology they need, without putting all their eggs in the same basket.
1) Additional benefits compared with home packages
Like business phone deals, broadband deals for corporate and professional customers enjoy added benefits compared with consumer packages.
- Faster uploads - if download speed is always a key figure in consumer-targeted ads, upload speeds matter much more to business users, as many files need to be uploaded to the company’s server, website or the cloud.
- Static IP addresses - static IP addresses, never included by default in consumer packages, offer a much greater ease when organizing a complex device network, and allow users to connect to their terminals remotely.
- Web hosting, domains and e-mail addresses - these services are needed by any business these days and are usually part of the package, sometimes at no extra cost.
- Leased lines - business broadband plans have the option to include leased lines, which is an invaluable asset in terms of security: the internet line is dedicated and does not suffer from the traffic or attacks carried on by other clients using shared resources.
2) Providers
Here again, pure players and corporate customer divisions of well-known carriers compete to cover the complete range of business phone and broadband deals.
- Major providers like BT, Orange, TalkTalk, EE will have dedicated business customer divisions
- Smaller providers include Zen Internet, XLN, Entanet or Wavenet
It should also be noted that business phone and broadband deals may be delivered on cable or satellite communications providers that do not necessarily cover the consumer market.
