So my employer pays a lot for long distance and conference services. It is still traditional wireline service through a PBX or whatever the modern equivalent is. By “a lot” I mean that an inter-LATA one minute call may be billed at, say, $1.06.
How is anyone getting away with this? I understand that the dirt-cheap VoIP phone applications are a fairly recent phenomenon, that big companies don’t move on a dime, and that they may be leery about adopting “unproven” low cost technologies. But even before we had VoIP, I (and every homesick immigrant) have been able to buy phone card through companies like IDT that allow five-cent-per-minute calling. I know that doesn’t necessarily scale to an enterprise-wide level, but come on – effectively, these guys (and I suppose many others) are paying their vendors pre-Bell-breakup L.D. rates. In my business, we can pass some of these costs through to clients, which may explain the lack of price competition, but even so, I’m struck by the complacency with which the L.D. providers get away with charging a twenty-times multiplier over the lowest market rate.
Or . . . am I missing something that insulates these guys from competition? Maybe some office buildings have tie-ups with the high-cost providers that makes it hard for low-cost providers to hook into your PBX?
Can’t tell what is happening with your employer. For instance, prisons can make a startling mark-up on their inmates’ phone calls.
There exist telephone service consultants that specifically work to get the phone bill down, and often are paid a percentage of the savings. Might be worth looking into.
Actually, the push to develop IP telephony came from big business that saw dedicated data lines between branch offices as a tool to reduce long distance costs.
Are you sure this is the rate going to the long distance company? Some companies take the ENTIRE cost of having a phone network (including leases on phones, salaries to the phone network people, the cost of maintaining the voice mail system, and the depreciation from the voice mail system) and allocate them by individual phone call. At a joint I worked at, all calls, long distance or local (don’t know about international), got “charged” $0.16/min to the department. Only a fraction of this went to the long-d carrier.
Maybe your company is smaller so has higher fixed phone maintenance costs and all fixed costs get allocated by long distance calls, making them seem very expensive?