Star2Star Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Connecticut Communications

Is Bad Weather Getting You Down?

If you live in the northeast you’ve seen just how disruptive weather can be. Whether it’s blizzards, fire, hurricanes, tonados or earthquakes, Mother Nature’s wrath has a nasty habit of knocking business communications down and taking more than a small bite out of their bottom lines.

Workers on the East Coast learned just how much company’s can lose when weather disaster strikes. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy roared ashore and left $65 billion in lost business, much of it resulting from phone system outages, in its fearsome wake. Of course hurricanes aren’t the only reason communications systems crash. A simple power outage or equipment failure can also render an enterprise helpless.

For years downtime was a fact of life that businesses could not avoid. Fortunately, that is no longer the case. Star2Star’s Scalable Cloud Communications Solutions include disaster avoidance and recovery that keeps businesses of all sizes up and running under even the harshest circumstances. Remember the aforementioned $65 billion lost during Sandy? Star2Star never experienced downtime during that storm.

When an unexpected outage strikes, StarRecovery detects the problem and seizes control of the system, rerouting calls to cell phones or auto attendants. The system is maintained in the cloud so it is not vulnerable to physical damage. During any kind of disruptive incident, your enterprise retains all the business functionality you would otherwise have with a Star2Star system, including:

Unlimited voice mail
Email delivery of voicemail
Customized call routing
Conference rooms

So if downtime has been a drag in the past or the threat of service interruption in the future has you up at night, consider looking to Star2Star’s Star Recovery disaster recovery for help. You’ll find your phone system, and your spirits, will be up, up, up.

Contact Connecticut Communications for a free onsite analysis of your telecommunications. concom@ctcom.com

Unified Communications Consultant

Every company needs technology in order to run their business. And with technology comes the necessary infrastructure. Voice and data cabling to each workstation provides workers with connection to the outside world for phones and computers. Do you go with CAT5e, CAT6 or fiber? The phone system needs phone lines, the computers need internet access. That will require a voice carrier and, in some cases, a different carrier for internet. Computers, do you install a premised based server on a Local Area Network, or do you subscribe to a Cloud service and get all your Microsoft licenses in the Cloud? If you want to protect your business property you will also want video surveillance. Smartphones and remote workers will require connection to the office from the outside, and it better be a secure connection so no one can steal your business secrets.

How does one go about finding all the pieces to this puzzle? There are so many options out there, how do you know what is best for your business?

Let Connecticut Communications be your technology consultant, and we do it all for FREE.

Connecticut Communications represents all the major voice & internet carriers. We can give you many different options and explain the pros and cons of each. Should you go with copper analog lines, a PRI, or SIP Trunks? For internet, is cable best, fiber, T-1 or a combination? We also represent the best phone manufacturers, NEC and Star2Star. We will explain what a hosted phones system is and if you should consider one. IP phones, digital, or a hybrid of both?

Let the professionals at Connecticut Communications help you with your technology needs, the consultation and recommendations are free. 203-985-1000.

Three Components to a Unified Communications Redundant System

You’ve already made the decision to update your business’s current communications system, which is great news. You’re well on your way to saving money and making it easier for your employees to work together. You’re also making a valuable investment in your company’s future ability to grow.

Before committing to a new phone system, ask yourself this: Would your business be affected if your communication system was down for 24 hours? 10 hours? 1 hour? How about 30 minutes?

If the answer is yes, then disaster recovery should be a high-priority item when vetting your options. More and more businesses are in agreement, realizing how significantly downtime costs are affecting their bottom lines.

The ability to reestablish severed communication in the midst of a network disruption is just as important as the need to recover software, data, and hardware, particularly for businesses engaged in e-commerce or where voice communications provide critical, revenue-generating functions (like a contact center). We tend to take communication for granted, but many businesses can’t survive without continuously operating systems.

Compared to traditional PBX phones, cloud-based systems offer major advantages when it comes to disaster recovery. Best-in-class communications systems have plans in place to protect the health and well being of your business. All you have to do is know what to look for before you buy. Use this checklist of necessary features to determine the viability of any potential communications system:

Failover with redundant Internet connections. Internet traffic and systems failures are normal occurrences that occasionally disrupt phone service. A best-in-class communications system has the ability to detect early signs of system failure and work around the problems seamlessly, switching between multiple Internet circuits if a problem is detected. Your phone lines continue working seamlessly, delivering calls on time and without any indication that an outage has occurred. Star2Star has redundant, high-speed fiber connections to the Internet at each of its eight major points of presence, ensuring that your business can continue to perform at the high levels you expect.
Redundant copper carriers. A truly hard-working system offers multiple routing methods in the event of a disaster, including alternative methods like copper cable. Star2Star partners with multiple traditional telephone carriers to send calls over the traditional phone network when necessary.
Redundant data centers. In the case of data center failure, a backup should always be available. Star2Star has redundant data centers which store customer information, and we continuously monitor the health of every phone, call, and network component between your phone system and our data centers, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Multiple layers of redundancy such as these avoid single points of failure, maximizing your up-time, and keeping your business going.

The right phone system will ensure that your company’s communications keep flowing in any situation, through a minor disruption or a significant natural disaster. Take advantage of cloud-based communications as a way to upgrade not only your phone system, but also your business continuity plan, encompassing communications as well as data.

Placing your trust in a communications provider is an important decision, one that we don’t take lightly. To find out more about Star2Star’s quality guarantee, 99.999 percent reliability rate, and superior and ongoing customer service: Contact Connecticut Communications 203-985-1000 or Concom@ctcom.com

Growing Your Business Should Not Be Expensive!

Expanding your business to new locations across the country or around the world should be exciting, rather than a source of stress and anxiety. Unfortunately, planning ways to maintain smooth, reliable, and cost-effective communications between disparate branch locations can be difficult, especially without a communications system that’s up to the challenge of business growth.

A dynamic, cloud-based phone system, like those offered by Star2Star, makes it easy for your business and your communications system to grow and scale seamlessly. In fact, you may be able to expand your communications system and cut the cost of your monthly phone bills. This sounds more like a dream than a nightmare.

Here are just a few of the many ways a cloud-based phone system takes the stress out of business expansion:

It’s easy to add phone extensions: More locations mean more employees, more customers, and more extensions. A cloud-based communications system allows you to add extensions quickly and seamlessly. Your workers and customers will never have to wait for the phone system to catch up with their communication needs, and your newest locations will immediately be brought into the company fold rather than being left in the dark.

More lines only when you need them: With a cloud-based communications system, you can add lines on the fly using a built-in feature called line bursting, so your customers will always be able to get through. Line pooling enables sharing a set of lines across multiple locations, reducing the total number of lines you will need as your business expands. Your phone service will remain consistent and dependable, without unexpected costs.

Savings on power bills: A cloud-based system requires less equipment and less on-premise infrastructure to run. It consumes less electricity and produces less heat. A business expansion can add greatly to your heating/cooling and electricity bills. Turning to cloud-based phone services is one way to keep those power bills under control and avoid the large, up-front costs associated with purchasing and hooking up new equipment.

Expansion without added infrastructure: A cloud-based phone solution enables your business to scale the phone and communications systems as it grows, without the expense and time of building out new infrastructure. Upfront costs for a business expansion are greatly lowered because the equipment involved with expanding a cloud-based system is typically much less than that associated with installing an entirely new hardwired system. Plus, your new locations will be making money and achieving full productivity sooner because they won’t have to wait for their phone systems to come online.

Keeping in touch with Unified Communications: As your business expands and needs to communicate across longer distances, Star2Star’s UC features are there to support your growth. Features such as videoconferencing allow for effective communication, even between branches across the country. Text-based chat enables instant communication, so no one is left waiting on critical business matters. Since UC features are cloud-based, they can be accessed from anywhere and anytime with the touch of a button.

Consistency and reliability: When you expand your business, you might expect that some things will simply fall through the cracks. You just hope they aren’t issues that will affect your company’s customer service and reputation. With a cloud-based communications system like Star2Star’s, you can count on continuity and consistency in your phone service, so you don’t have to worry about preserving business continuity in the midst of the expansion chaos. No matter what else happens, different branches will be able to keep in touch and customers will be able to reach you. That should make you rest a little easier.

Contact Connecticut Communications for more information on the Star2Star solution. 203-985-1001.

5 Ways to Improve Business Communication

Does your business agility need a boost?

Most organizations are familiar with the principle of distributing IT systems to minimize IT service failures. Fewer organizations give adequate thought to maximizing the availability of their most valuable asset, human resource! By distributing both, organizations can eliminate single points of failure and survive a wide variety of threats. Here are 5 ways you can improve business continuity by relocating or distributing your workforce.

1. Relocate your employees to alternate locations

Empty desks are a sign that work is changing. How often do you look across your office and see half the desks are empty? On any given day, individuals may be working at another office, working at home or meeting with customers and suppliers. We no longer rely on tangible objects such as paper diaries or filing cabinets, anything and everything is accessible online.

2. Use homeworking as part of your plan

Imagine if your organization had an office for every employee. Denial of access at any one location would only affect one employee. Homeworking embraces this principle by securely extending an individual’s desktop over a broadband network into their home. Individuals have access to communications, business applications and data just as they would in the office.

3. Improve availability with mobile

Integrate mobile devices into your enterprise communications. Unified Communications enables mobile devices to be integrated into an enterprise communication solution. ‘Single Number Reach’ allows individuals to be contacted via a single enterprise directory number on any device that can be directly dialed. When disaster strikes, individuals can choose to answer their calls on their smartphone or tablet.

4. Create a disaster recovery site

In the event of denial of access to a building or metropolitan area, your key workers can relocate to a disaster recovery site. Mission critical organizations commonly deployed disaster recovery sites in the 80’s and 90’s. These facilities were largely the domain of larger enterprises that placed a high priority on business continuity, for example government organizations and investment banks.

5. Distribute your contact center

For many organizations, the contact center will define success or failure in a crisis. Until recently, most contact centers were single site solutions. Agents travelled to the contact center, logged in and completed their days work in a fixed office location. Today, contact center agents can work at another office, at home or from a mobile device. And there is no impact on reporting either. Real time and historical reporting is centralized and available from ‘anywhere’. Consequently, organizations can apply the same business continuity principles to a contact center agent as any other key employee.

Contact Connecticut Communications for information on improving your business communications. We represent the best unified communications companies in the world with NEC, Mitel and Star2Star Communications. Visit our website www.ctcom.com or call us 203.985.1000.

The End Is Near for Your Legacy Phone System, Are You Ready?

Recently, the Federal Communications Commission announced new rules for the transition of traditional phone networks to IP-based communication. The transition itself has been ongoing for the past several years and is intended to move our communications away from outdated legacy copper. It is a clear vote in favor of faster, better communication systems for all.

Change is slow, however. Rather than a flood of movement to IP, as some predicted, many businesses have opted to keep their old public switched telephone network (PSTN) systems simply because they work. They keep business moving, and customers and employees communicating. While the demand for PSTN phones is decreasing, nearly 50 percent of all endpoints are still digital—despite the fact that manufacturers have been decreasing their levels of support for PSTM systems for the past five years or longer.

Chances are your enterprise PSTN system is nearing end-of-life, if the end hasn’t already arrived. Many manufacturers have by now issued end-of-support notices, or will be soon, which means that you’re out of luck if you need service for your phone system. As telephony providers continue to chop away at support, spare parts will become increasingly difficult to find, additional gateways nonexistent, and bug fixes, upgrades, and patches things of the past. In the event of an outage, the manufacturer will not be stepping in to help. Should your communication system run into a problem, how would your organization fare?

If you’re like most enterprises, you don’t want to find out.

Embrace The Upgrade

The good news is that you have a clear opportunity to move your business forward. Whether you’re in a situation where your PSTN system, or maybe even an older VoIP system, is losing support, it’s the perfect time to adopt a robust unified communications (UC) strategy. You’ve waited long enough—UC has gone beyond the hype and is proving to be a major asset to companies of all sizes.

Trading in your old system for a Star2Star Scalable Cloud Communications Solution is about more than just replacing one commodity with another. Our cloud communications tools change the game completely. Our services and features—like texting, videoconferencing, and easy faxing—enable smoother workflows and greater productivity. They also fit naturally into today’s changing workplace. You can bring all your remote workers together with one easy-to-manage system, whether they’re using a traditional phone or their own mobile phone.

Other compelling reasons to switch:

A system designed for you: Our support team members are trained to work closely with customers to design a UC system that works for your business—not one that’s bundled or prepackaged.
Easy transition: If you’d like to keep your existing phone number, we’ll connect it to your new Star2Star cloud phone system. We can also emulate most of the functionality of your previous phones to make the switch easy for employees.
Simple installation: We carefully plan out installs in advance to make sure everything goes smoothly. Our nationwide network of partners will install your new Star2Star system alongside your existing telephone system. You use the new system to place outbound calls while inbound calls continue to arrive on the old system until the transition is complete.
Ongoing support: We provide continual support even after installation so if anything goes wrong we’re there to help. Our system is easy to manage so you may choose to have your own IT department do it. We can also manage many aspects of the system for you remotely.
Business continuity: We guarantee 99.999 percent uptime reliability, and keep the system up and running in the event of an outage thanks to our rich suite of advanced disaster avoidance and recovery protections.

Be proactive and avoid the stress of an end-of-support notice. Contact Connecticut Communications for a free consultation 203.985.1001.

Premised Based vs. Hosted Phone System

Every company wants to know what is better for their organization, a premised based PBX or a hosted PBX phone system? The answer might depend upon how you answer these questions.

1) A – Do you purchase a new phone system every 5 years?

B – or every 10-15 years?

2) A – Do you have an internet circuit that guarantees at least 10MB of bandwidth in BOTH directions?

B – or less?

3) A – Do you have CAT5e cable or higher at each phone location?

B – or older CAT3 voice cable?

4) A – Do you use/want every unified communications feature?

B – or you just want the basic PBX features?

5) A – Do you have multiple office locations?

B – or one location?

If you answered ‘A’ to three or more questions you favor a hosted phone system. If you answered ‘B’ for three or more questions you favor a premised based phone system.

We offer two (2) premised based phone systems and four (4) hosted phone systems. Contact us to for a free consultation to see which one is right for you. We sell/install nationwide, give us a call 800-275-7777.

April 2017 Connecticut Communications Newsletter

In April 2017 Connecticut Communications newsletter we talk about PBX Cloud offerings and if it’s right for your business. The cloud is not for everyone and is that really where you want to put your phone lines? For some the answer is a huge YES! For some, it’s a maybe and for others it is simply not right for their business.

Hosted VoIP Phone System

A hosted phone system is a business phone system that is hosted in the cloud.

VoIP phones connect to your local area network and then out to the internet. However, it’s not that easy. You will need to ensure you have what is necessary for a successful deployment.A Hosted Phone System might be perfect for your organization or it might be costly. But one thing is for certain.

Not all Hosted Systems are the same.

Benefits of a Hosted PBX

No onsite equipment to maintain
Comes with Maintenance Contract
Little upfront cost
Automatic Software Upgrades
All features included
Share lines/system with other offices
Includes Unlimited Calling

Connecticut Communications sells Hosted PBX systems from four (4) different providers, contact us to find out which one is best for you?

Sales@ctcom.com