Notes from the Watertower

Been ripped-off for a telecoms solution?

I visited a new potential client last week, along with one of my resellers to discuss their on-going telecoms needs.

It turns out that they’ve been stitched-up with a 7-year leasing deal on the hardware they currently have. What’s worse is that what they pay each quarter in leasing and maintenance costs would pay for one of my systems to be bought outright.

I was shocked.

What was worse, is that one small part of the deal they have with their current vendor is for a VoIP system to connect their 3 offices together… They are paying £797 a quarter over 7 years to lease the VoIP cards for their legacy PBX, and £125 a quarter over 5 years for the maintenance on those cards, just to make “free” calls between offices. I doubt those poor people would even make £900 in BT call costs phoning between offices. This is especially worse, as their current vendor has also taken over line rental and call charges too – so giving them a discount on ordinary charges between sites is something that’s well in their powers to do, but they don’t, preferring to blatantly rip their customer off.

This is one of the reasons I got started in telephony – there are too many companies like this being taken for a ride by unscrupulous telecom equipment vendors.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Telecoms, Whinges. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.