BT Blitzes Small Business With New Offerings

British Telecom has got off to a flying start in 2008 with two announcements about new products for the small business sector.

In partnership with Cisco it has launched ‘BT Communications Complete’ which uses the former’s UC500 voice, data, video and wifi, IP phone system to give small to medium sized businesses a communications system which had previously been the preserve of much larger organisations.

BT claims the service will help small businesses reduce operating costs, allow staff to work more effectively together and improve customer service.  Similar claims are made for its ‘Business One Plan’ which introduces the ‘triple play’ (broadband, landline and mobile) to the SME market.

The backup and support built into both these offering could well save your business time, but cost savings are more difficult to identify.

Usually it pays to shop around, if you want the best deal and some purchasing departments would argue it’s not a good idea to consolidate with one supplier.  Comparisons, however, are difficult. 

BT is a little coy about pricing of its Communications Complete service, perhaps understandably because each business is going to have different needs.  However, I was able to glean that on average the service would cost less than a cup of coffee per employee, per day.

If you buy your coffee at Starbucks. you’d be looking at around £2.00 per day per employee.  That equates to a monthly cost of nearly £3,000 for the 48 local staff for whom the package is currently able to cater.  This, of course, is for the hardware and support alone, not the price of calls.

broadband | BT | Cisco | SME | telecoms | UC500 |