More competition. Maybe

For large businesses, telecommunication costs hurt in the contact centre, says Karl Reed, sales director at Elingo. In a contact centre, the single biggest operating cost is staff, at between 60% and 70%. The then and there biggest cost is inbound and outbound calls.

But when Reed's clients make design decisions about their contact centres, they don't approach decisions about bandwidth and the number of phone lines according to requirements. Instead, they attempt to limit cost. Reed says his clients always try to skimp on bandwidth. They as well go for the bare minimum on the number of enterprise-standard phone lines to their PABX, as well known as ISDN PRIs.

“An ISDN PRI is the most common way of connecting a business to the outside world,” explains Reed. “Simply put, it is a piece of wire from the outside world to the PABX or contact centre that allows 30 concurrent phone calls. Operators just as Telkom, Neotel, MTN and Vodacom currently provide PRIs.

The international market

“We are killing ourselves in the international market. A lot of local clients that would love to launch outbound sales environments just sit back and say, 'Adding another 10 PRIs that would allow me to make 300 calls at one time will set me back R30 000 to R50 000 a month, earlier I've made one phone call'.”

High telecoms costs may even prevent companies from using bandwidth-dependent flexibility and cost-saving measures. As an illustration, software-as-a-service, where a business can rent hosted applications on a pay-per-use basis over the Internet, becomes irrelevant if the cost of connecting to the provider is too high.

“The whole cloud market, in effect, the whole virtual environment market is strapped by bandwidth,” says Edwin Thompson, GM of innovation and infrastructure at MTN Business. “If all you have to the corporate office is a couple of megabits of capacity, it's pointless to try to run your applications or voice telephony across that.”