By Julian Goldsmith, 27 August 2008 16:24
NEWS
The City of Edinburgh Council has signed a three-year, £3.2m deal with BT for a fixed rate telephone network.
The network will run on the BT Hosted Voice platform providing a virtual private telephone network to all of the council's sites, and will give the council one-rate-for-all calls, whether national, international or mobile, with the exception of 118 directory services.
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It's estimated the network will save the local authority £250,000 per year over five years, if the council takes up the option to extend the contract for a further two years.
The deal is the latest extension of the council's partnership with BT, which the carrier claims has already given the council £33.3m in efficiency savings over the last 15 years.
In a statement, City of Edinburgh Council convenor of finance councillor Gordon Mackenzie said: "This deal will deliver immediate savings and give us the vital management information we need to move towards a future with all calls and data sharing a single high speed network."
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1. Charles Smith
"One Rate for all calls" - International calls have a cost component at the b-end (far end). This equalisation of call cost must imply that local calls are subsidising international calls made by the council.
Given that most council business is local one must question whether the deal represents best value on the bulk of their calls, i.e. local calls?
I hope that Edinburgh are paying no more than £0.01 per minute for their national calls and also free of any connection charge.
An easy metric for this is:
The Total annual cost of phone services divided by the total number of external call minutes. This would of course exclude any interbuilding VOIP.
Most organisations can generally look to save at least 30% on call costs with no reduction in quality for very little effort.