Communications Convergence

Innovative technologies allow entrepreneurs to conduct business from nearly anywhere at anytime

Story by Sean Fitzgerald

Omnipresence – the ability to be in multiple places at the same time – has long held a place among world mythologies as a god-like attribute.

And as far-fetched as such an attribute seems, mankind gets closer and closer to making omnipresence a reality with each new innovation in the telecommunications industry. Such has been the case since the advent of the telegraph, and continues today as busy business professionals respond to telephone calls, voice mail and email messages from nearly anywhere we take our corporeal selves.

Along the way, these technological advances have meant that service providers in once-parallel industries are now competing with one another. Telephone communications are available today via the Internet, through traditional fiber optic cable, across the airwaves through wireless radio and microwave frequencies, and still over the elaborate network of copper wiring which once carried telegraph signals from coast to coast.

So many choices and so many new capabilities allow professionals the freedom to communicate with employees, partners and business prospects more efficiently and cost-effectively than ever before.

“You don’t really have to physically be anywhere anymore with the advent of the Internet,” said Scott VanderSanden, the Wisconsin market president for AT&T.

What does that mean for business professionals?

Someone can call your office and ring straight through to your cell phone, whether you’re in northeast Wisconsin or on the West Coast.

Work orders can be sent out directly to technicians in the field, saving them the time of having to drive all the way back to the shop.

Deals no longer have to wait until you get back to the office – everything necessary to make and sign a deal can be at your fingertips while you’re on the go.

Just as importantly, more businesses are operating without even providing an office or desk for some of their employees – some employers are finding it’s easiest to have certain staff work remotely often from home. Time Warner Cable Business Class can set up teleworker service from an employee’s home, and is looking to continually expand on remote worker solutions for small businesses.

“We’re going to have to respond to our customers’ needs to extend the workplace to any kind of environment,” said Paul Molchany, northeast Wisconsin sales manager for Time Warner Cable Business Class.

Differentiating services
Communications providers have responded consumers’ need for more choices, ultimately helping to blur the lines between once-isolated industries and build silos of wired and wireless services that provide voice, video and data.

About five years ago, traditional cable television companies began offering voice services across their recently implemented fiber optic networks. Last year in Wisconsin, the state legislature modified its decades-old municipal franchising structure, which allowed traditional telco providers the opportunity to offer video television products. Both have made high-speed Internet services available to customers for nearly a decade.

Together, each provider’s buffet of communications services can be packaged up into small business solutions that are often more cost-effective. Though providing voice and high-speed data are still the core services from each provider, other menu offerings such as hosting your business’ server off-site, providing unified messaging, or enhanced security for your computer network, chances are that your current communications provider has one or all of the above.

In many cases, such services can help a business owner replace what otherwise might require a part time IT staff, or contacting IT services out to a third party. That can be particularly important for a small to mid-size business owner who doesn’t have too sophisticated a computer network, but still wants it to meet the business’ needs, noted Time Warner’s Molchany.

“They want someone who is an expert on managing their network, they want someone who can come in and manage their security,” Molchany said.

Becoming more popular is the ability to more seamlessly integrate voice services with the computer at your desktop, even with your laptop. Retrieving voice mail through readable email, or having a customer’s complete profile appear on your computer screen before even touching the receiver, are all part of evolving managed Internet protocol, or managed IP, product offerings.

“When a phone call comes in, you’re seeing it on your computer screen,” explained Chad Mix, northeast Wisconsin market manager for TDS Metrocom. “The functionality allows customers to do business better.”

Doing business better, like having all relative information about a customer appear on the screen at the moment their phone call comes in. Managed IP services can operate hand in hand with a business’ exist customer relationship management software, and can be set up on a computer network to provide payment and billing information or problems and concerns the customer has experienced in the past, for example.

TDS Metrocom is just launching its managed IP service for businesses in northeast Wisconsin beginning this month.

Mix explained that with a managed IP service, the customer doesn’t have to maintain switching equipment at its location – it’s all done remotely from TDS facilities – meaning there’s no expensive capital outlay to set your business up with such a service.

AT&T has evolved its network in much the same manner, said VanderSanden.

Often, such services are “bundled” together into packages that are more cost-effective to a business owner than purchasing each service ala carte.

On a different note at Oshkosh-based NTD – a more than a decade-old telephone and Internet provider in the Fox Valley – president Bill Miller has simplified his organization’s focus to providing data. Miller’s philosophy of keeping communications simple so that his staff can focus on providing fast and reliable data services still allows a business owner to have an expert take over their network – NTD partners with a cadre of contracted specialists to provide services in ancillary areas like wireless installation or network support.

“I hate to say that you can be everything to everybody, but you just can’t do that,” said Miller. “There’s never going to be a sole source for everything. What we’ve learned is that customer service is at the core of what (our client’s) want.”

Building pipelines
Nearly every communications provider in the area has spent millions of dollars over the past few years to expand and upgrade their infrastructure.

In the early days of the Internet, Web content was simple and didn’t require a wide open pipeline, or bandwidth, to transfer from place to place. As Web content has become more complex – including video that might contain several hundred megabytes – business professionals have been able to do more with the similar devices from remote locations.

“As speeds over all the networks continue to improve, customer experiences have been better and better,” said Dan Fabry, chief operating officer for Green Bay-based Cellcom, a cellular voice and data provider within the Nsight group of companies. Cellcom’s wireless network has expanded from just 14.4 kilobytes less than a decade ago to as much as 700 kb today, providing much of the same speed and data security as a traditional wired DSL line.

Though text messaging is on the absolute bottom-end of bandwidth requirements for companies like Cellcom, there’s become a significantly higher awareness of texting for business purposes. Fabry explained texting is a simple and less-invasive manner to respond to a co-worker’s question or send a job order without taking much of their time or worrying about interrupting a meeting.

“If you would have said ‘text messaging’ five years ago, you would have gotten a lot of blank stares,” Fabry said. “Today, a majority of cell phone users make at least one text message a month.”

But larger document files, the expanded use of video, and more complex Web sites have exponentially increased the need for greater capacity to a business’ network.

In the past three years, for example, NTD has doubled the capacity of its data configuration, and has upgraded its wiring to handle up to 45 megabytes of data, nearly 30 times more than its traditional DSL lines. For even more muscle, Ethernet connections can take a business straight out to the Internet, but with a higher cost.

Wireless data services – offered through the traditional wired and cellular telephone providers – comes with the same kind of security you’d expect from wired data service. Unlike the standard, publicly accessible WiFi you might be familiar with from a coffee shop or a library, today’s wireless connections allow Internet and email use on a laptop with a SmartCard plugged in - or from a PDA device - all with a dedicated signal available anywhere you might roam, so long as you’re within range of a nearby cellular tower.

In modern times, explained Fabry, an employer’s field technician three states away could be dispatched out to complete a job order by text message; get there, and not recognizing the problem, take a picture with a camera on a cell phone and email it to engineers back at the corporate office; who could then troubleshoot the issue, and call, email or text solution to the technician in the field. 

As wireless breaks through some of the early technological barriers that wired communications services faced not all that long ago, nomadic communications are being delivered faster, providing more data in shorter periods of time.

“It’s an exciting time to be in telecom because there’s so much more technology emerging,” said TDS’s Mix. “There’s wonderful new products coming out that allow business owners to operate their business even better.”

‘Magic’ in hardware
Quietly blazing a trail on the cutting edge of telecommunications hardware, Schmooze Communications of Neenah has been developing and selling its server-based private branch exchange – or PBX – telephone systems for the past two years.

Competing with so-called legacy phone systems such as NEC and Nortel, the innovators at Schmooze in Neenah have developed a less costly, easy-to-use phone system alternative with a little bit of magic. The company’s proprietary ‘magic button’ – unveiled this past June – allows users to simply say what they want to do, whether it’s intercomming a fellow employee in another office or setting up a temporary message to inform callers that you’re away at a meeting.

Using speech recognition software, Schmooze’s PBXact telephone system can identify when the user is getting frustrated with programming the system, explained Tony Lewis, the business development arm of the Schmooze team.

The system asks the user if they’re frustrated or confused, attempts to calm down the user, and then helps the user back up the process to where the programming left off.

“The magic button was a start into what we feel unified communications should be,” said Lewis.

A hybrid of legacy phone systems and voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP, PBXact is designed for small to mid-size businesses with a minimum of eight to ten phone extensions. Like other IP-based services, Schmooze’s product allows users to connect the office with their cell phone, retrieve email, or connect multiple locations within a company into what’s essentially a wide area network.

With a nationwide market of customers whose telephone systems have ranged as high as 600 various extensions, PBXact is distributed through a network of dealers across the country. Schmooze has partnered with Appleton-based RanderCom to market its product throughout northeast Wisconsin. President Bob Randerson said customers have been immediately attracted to the convenience of the product.

“It gives them more bang for their buck as far as features go,” Randerson said. “This is very easy for the end user to make the day-to-day changes themselves.”