One of my clients in the Pittsburgh area has eleven locations distributed across several local calling areas within two Pittsburgh LATAs. Five locations are in the city itself. The other six are in the South Hills, with two inside Allegheny County but outside the city, and four located to the south across the county line in Washington County. The client spent enormous amounts of money on phone service because an interoffice call between locations often crossed intralata boundaries.
This company had a patchwork of standalone LANs at each location and a few Internet dialup accounts. Each of their largest two locations had its own phone system, but they defeated part of the potential benefit of those sys- tems by running POTS access lines into them instead of higher bandwidth access lines.
Moreover, the client had many additional access lines that did not terminate at their own telephone system. They leased these lines like a consumer would lease a POTS line, but they were paying business prices and did not connect these lines to their telephone systems. The other nine locations had
basic POTS access lines. All told, ninety-one POTS access lines ran across the eleven sites.
In addition, they had two LECs providing their access and eight toll carrier service providers: The client received monthly bills from ten companies! The client’s key people were stressed out just from all the bills they were getting. They also couldn’t understand from the bills why they had such high
charges. Some of the locations were less than ten miles apart but had the highest recurring charges each month.
No comments:
Post a Comment