IT Hygiene - Telco & Mobility
One of the less glamorous aspects of IT, mostly in the current environment of AI and cloud buzzwords, is managing a company's telecommunications requirements. For a standard business, this involves office internet, mobile phone plans, data plans and hopefully non physical landlines. Given the requirement for these services dates back 10s of years, the relative reduced set of options in the marketplace as vendors are quite embedded and the relative simplicity of setting up a new service, this tends to be a set and forget service, rarely re-visited, scrutinized or optimized.
Office internet
It is fair to say that workspaces have changed since the Covid pandemic. Whereas before the pandemic I was managing some on premises infrastructure, multiple redundant internet lines with complex failover and expensive networking, storage and server equipment, I have currently reduced the office IT equipment to 1 internet line, 1 firewall, 1 switch, 1 small UPS and only Wi-Fi options to connect to the internet. For companies that still have a hybrid model with 2-3 days in the office, the office infrastructure is no longer business critical. This means that I do not need to source high end ISPs, with high SLAs and multiple circuits from multiple ISPs to ensure the internet is up. If the internet goes down, I still have a business 5G automated failover that can allow people to continue working if it's a short interruption, albeit at reduced speeds or just go home, which they would be happy about. I highly recommend everyone revisits their office internet and infrastructure (if you still have an office still!) as the requirements might be different now and result in a simplification of the architecture, an increased security and reduced spent.
For the internet line you do select, tailor it to the number of users in the office, look at the upload and download speeds as generally coaxial services are limited in upload speeds whereas fiber can make for a truly symmetric connection. I suggest allocating 15-25 Mbps to each user and enforcing this throttling in your Access Points/Firewall. By multiplying the number of users with their quota, and allowing for a buffer, you can choose the plan that meet your requirements. Now, if you have 200 users in the office, it doesn't mean you need a 5 Gbps line necessarily, you will probably be fine with 1 Gbps, depending on the types of services in place. I won't go into details on how to setup the network for the office, but that is more important then the actual ISP as otherwise you will face issues such as blind spots for access points, incorrect prioritization of service if QoS is not setup, starvation of business users if no throttling is in place, security issues if you don't have separation between corporate and guest Wi Fi or separate subnets/virtual lans within the corporate network. A lot of this can be dealt with at the design stage and once it's setup the right away, unless something material changes in your usage patterns, then this can remain a set and forget (with required patches and maintenance of course).
Mobile & Data Plans
When it comes to selecting mobile and data plans, there is less you need to do technically and more that is required commercially to manage them effectively. First, you need to identify the number and type of services you need, whether you need to buy them with a device or not. Generally, it's better if you buy your device from the telco vendor and include the cost as part of the monthly charges, as this way there is less Capex spend to lifecycle devices and you know you have the devices locked in to life cycle every 3 years or so.
Once you have figured out what to do about the devices, it's time to look at how much data do you need, and generally business plans these days come with unlimited data so unless there is a big difference in cost between unlimited data and capped data and you know your users have low data requirements (very unlikely these days), stick to the unlimited data plan, text messages and calls.
When selecting your telco vendors, consider the areas that your workforce operates in and the coverage that provider has. If your workforce is mainly in a city, that is less important, but if you have field workforce across a nation, then this makes a whole different and your field workforce will be happy with he service that works best for their geographic area. Do your research.
A separate area to consider is international calling plans, but I find that if you are in the US, that generally covers Canada and Mexico and for other countries, for those few people in your organization that require true international calling, you can do monthly addons for data and calls for when they travel. The reality is that any call these days can be on FaceTime or Microsoft Teams so data is the focus.
Once you have setup your fleet of services, consider the term you are willing to lock in for. The longer the term and the higher the number of services, the more value you can get but also risk. Some telco vendors will offer credit incentives if you sign 1000+ services with them for 24 months and those credits are sizable - to give an example, on a 2,400 line commitment for 18 months, we got $300K credits to our bills and that was because the bill itself was $120K per month - it's worth it if you need it. If you decide to go on a month to month plan, then there is less risk for you, almost no Early Termination Fees but generally you will get higher cost for the services.
Once you have established the right line fleet for your company, you need to manage it well and that means looking to cancel your zero usage services and renegotiating your deals every 12 months or so. In my experience, if you have a sizable portfolio of services for telco, there is a high change that over time at least 10% of those have zero usage - people have moved out from the business, or the business changed in size and the lines were not terminated. It's not ideal for whomever is managing the lines, but it happens. Telco vendors are not necessarily proactive about warning you about zero usage lines, as it hurts their business and if you are using a 3rd party to manage this for you, they generally charge you on a per line basis so they are not generally incentivized to let you know either. You think this situation doesn't happen, but it happens all the time. I suggest you do a quarterly review of you active lines with zero usage and suspend them for 30 days then cancel them completely. I have saved 100s of thousands of dollars by doing this. The other aspect is to go back to the market and shop for better deals every 12-24 months. Every vendor has incentives to convert you over from a competitor, but they have much less to keep you as a customer for some reason. So shop around.