Phones, network and access

What is actually happening

The layer everything else sits on was assembled, not designed.

A phone system chosen years ago for a smaller business. Wireless added a room at a time. Access granted when someone joined and never removed when they left. Each decision was sensible on the day. Together they are a system nobody designed, and when it fails the failure is intermittent, which is the hardest kind to get anyone to take seriously.

The two costs are specific. Calls that do not reach a person — that is revenue arriving and leaving. And the time it takes a new person to actually start working, which most owners have never measured and which is frequently days.

How this gets sold elsewhere

Managed IT providers sell this as a monthly contract, and it covers running it, which is real work and worth paying for. The published range is below.

What that contract does not include is somebody independent deciding what should exist in the first place, or holding the provider to it afterwards with evidence. Your provider specifying your network is the vendor marking their own homework, and they would probably say the same.

Phone vendors sell handsets and seats. Wireless vendors sell access points. Nobody sells the design.

What we do

We test what you have, the way it fails. Where calls go after hours and at lunch. Where the wireless actually drops, room by room, rather than where the map says it should. What a new person can and cannot reach on their first morning.

We write down who can reach what — including the accounts of people who left, which is nearly always a finding.

We specify what should exist: what it must do, what it should cost, and what "working" means in terms you can test.

We run the project. Cutover, training, and the written record of what was changed.

We hold the vendor to the specification, with evidence rather than opinion.

Then we test the same things again.

What you get

A specification you own, in plain language, that you can hand to any provider.

The work delivered, with a cutover that does not take the business down.

The access list — who can reach what, and what we closed.

A short written record of what changed and why, so the next person does not have to guess.

The before-and-after numbers.

What we measure

Share of calls that reach a person, in hours and out. Dropped or dead spots, tested in the same places before and after. Time from a new hire's start to being able to do their job. Accounts still active for people who have left.

Where this comes from

Two decades of this work at a scale where an outage was measured in money, including moving a bank's phone system site by site — sixteen thousand phones in its headquarters metro, with three low-use lines found afterwards.

A business of your size does not need that scale. It needs the same discipline: know what "working" means, test it, and hold whoever built it to the answer.

What this is not

Not a managed service. We do not run it, monitor it, or take a call at 2am, and we do not resell the hardware or the licences. When the work is done it belongs to you or to your provider — now with a specification to hold them to.

Not replacing your provider. Frequently the outcome is that your existing provider does the work, better, because somebody finally wrote down what it had to do.

What this costs

We do not publish a price, and here is the reason rather than an excuse: we would be guessing. Two businesses with the same symptom are frequently a factor of five apart in what the work involves, and a published number would either scare off the smaller one or shortchange the larger one.

What we will commit to:

The quote is fixed before any work starts, and it is a single number, not an hourly rate that grows.

We name it after we have seen the work, not before. Which means the first conversation costs you nothing and commits you to nothing.

If we think something is not worth doing, we say so — including when what you are asking for is the thing we would be paid to do.

Nothing renews automatically. Every engagement has an end.