FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT can be an astonishing number. If you get a 55% in high school calculus, well, you’re barely passing. But if you’re a cable company and in just over two years since launch of local telephony 55% of your cable customers are also phone customers, well, that’s just pretty darn good.
So, for Mountain Cable, launching a business phone service in its licensed area was a no-brainer. “A lot of the people who bought a residential service were also business owners, and we started to hear: ‘when can I get this for my office?’” said Mountain Cable president John Piercy in a recent interview with Cartt.ca.
Mountain serves close to 40,000 basic cable customers in a portion of southern Hamilton and some of the city’s outlying areas. It launched local telephony in 2005 and was overwhelmed by the positive response from its customers.
So, after some technology testing and some new hires, Mountain officially launched the service last month with about 120 local folks at an event inside Hamilton’s very cool Warplane Heritage Museum, which sits beside the Hamilton Airport in Mount Hope (and both companies are Mountain Cable business telephony customers, too).
At launch, Mountain had about 300 active business customers, most of whom are friendly testers being transitioned into paying customers.
And what do small and medium sized enterprises want? A lower price, of course and with Mountain’s residential offer starting at $24.99 a month, business owners knew going into the testing that they would emerge with significant savings. The opening basic offer to local businesses is $24.95 a month for the first three months.
“When we look at the business market… they want savings – and if they’ve already invested in equipment and infrastructure all they’re looking to do is to replace their Bell service with a service that is as reliable, as feature rich, but lower in price,” explains Piercy.
“That’s our trunk replacement service – and that’s the one that probably the majority of our customers ask for.”
Mountain also offers an IP-based, hosted PBX service to businesses who have had enough phone lines to need one or which may be replacing their old one – at serious savings, since there is little on-site gear for the company beyond their handsets – and no telephony technological know-how required by the business itself. All of it is hosted by Mountain Cable – at significant savings.
Case in point is the Warplane Heritage Museum, whose PBX was recently fried in a lightning strike. Replacing it would have cost over $10,000 and – like many local city museums – such an unplanned expense would have involved fundraising because it was not budgeted for.
The museum chose the Mountain-hosted PBX which required no upfront cost. “It just didn’t make sense for them to get another one with a large capital purchase,” said Piercy.
Other businesses in Mountain’s region now using its phone service are places doctor’s offices, retailers and car dealerships. “We do everything from the smoke shop – the ma and pa shop buying one line, or maybe a second line for a point of sale terminal way up to fairly large customers,” added Piercy.
So what kind of savings are we talking about for business customers? “It’s safe to say that anybody in our business territory can expect 20 to 40% savings,” added Pat Kiely, Mountain Cable’s director of business operations and development.
Plus, Mountain also offers a number of other bundled deals with the company’s broadband service and also offers wireless Internet in rural places its wired network doesn’t quite reach.
But that’s as far as Mountain plans to go for now. Piercy says the company has looked at leasing fibre and extending its business telephony beyond its cable area, “But right now, our customers are all in our area and that’s going to be where we focus,” added the president.
And because this is a business environment where its customers are likely to have more – and more complex – requests and other issues, the company hired a new team of specialized salespeople to handle business customers. “It’s a more sophisticated sale… it can be a lot more complicated,” explained Kiely. “So, we had to go with a dedicated staff.”
And because of the extra demands placed on their telephone provider by businesses, Mountain decided to keep control off many of the features it outsourced with its residential phone service, in-house.
“On the residential side, Allstream controls not only the switching, the PSTN connectivity, they also provide some of our residential service features. We decided early on in this development that features were going to be something that we wanted to have tight control over,” said Piercy.
So, using another local business, technology provider and consultants Clearcable (and its Nomad product), Mountain has been able to own all that it offers to its business clientele. “We still use Allstream for our telephone connections – so they give us our connectivity to the rest of the world. But all of the features (voicemail, music while on hold, etc.) are all actually done in our headend,” he added.
“We wanted to be quick to respond to the new feature requirements and it’s a lot easier when you control the box and code compared to when a third party does it and you have to go through them for all of the co-ordination and testing.”
And, one of the most attractive aspects of this new service is that’s it’s profitable right away because the company’s choice of Clearcable’s solution lets Mountain grow and deploy gradually, “rather than going out and looking at a massive investment in an infrastructure that would be capable of handling x-hundreds-of-thousands of lines,” added Kiely.
“We’re able to do this in pieces and say that we can handle another 300 lines here – and when we get to the 300, we can grow into 1,000. They’re modular pieces that a company our size can make some sense out of.”
With Mountain’s success in residential telephony and early returns looking good on the business side, watch for more small cable companies to dive in head first into the local business phone service pool, too.
