C2C Recruitment is a recruitment consultancy specialising in the UK security industry.
Most of their phone calls are to candidates who prefer to take such calls on their mobile phone. C2C use their BT Revelation PBX to make all of their outgoing calls. An analysis of their BT phone bill showed that their calls to mobile phones were costing an average of 16p per minute and were taking in total 838 minutes per month. A call during the day from a BT phone line to a T-Mobile phone at standard BT rate currently costs 19p per minute.
The reason why such calls are so expensive is because the call crosses the landline PSTN network and the cellular GSM network and so incurs two charges – the terminating cellular charge being passed on by BT to their customer.
C2C decided to reduce the cost of calls to mobiles by routing such calls directly to the cellular network using the new Burnside Desktop Mobile.
There were two ways in which the Burnside unit could be connected to their office phone system. The first involved connecting it to the trunk side of their Revelation PBX and the second involved connecting it to the extension side via two line telephones. By connecting the Desktop Mobile to the trunk side, C2C would have lost the use of an exchange line since it was not possible to add a further trunk connection to the Revelation. Furthermore all calls to mobiles would have to be manually routed by adding a two digit prefex to every call and it was concluded that users would not want to be bothered or remember to do this – hence no savings would be achieved.
So it was decided to replace some of the single extension handsets with a two line telephone - one line being connected to the PBX extension and the other line to the Burnside Desktop Mobile. The routing of calls to mobiles could not be simpler. All the caller has to do is to press line 1 button to make a call to landline phones and press line 2 button for calls to mobiles. Even though these phones are in parallel indication of line busy is shown all other phones by a flashing LED. The phone used is the BT Converse 2025.
C2C had a choice of cellular network tariffs to use with their Burnside Desktop Mobile. Unfortuantely the most attractive tariff from Vodafone could not be used due to very poor signal strength from the local Vodafone cell. This tariff would have given them 700 inclusive cross network minutes per month at a cost of 5p per minute. So it was decided to go for an O2 tariff that gives C2C 1000 inclusive cross network minutes per month at a cost of 6p/min. On this tariff it is possible to roll forward unused minutes into the following month.
So the use of a Burnside Telecom Desktop Mobile by C2C has reduced their call cost to mobiles by 62% which savings is enabling it to break even on its capital cost in three months.
The Burnside Desktop Mobile also provides a corporate SMS text terminal and can act as an emergency back up to phone and data lines should their landline service cease.
