Posted on: 2nd February 2023, by Magrathea
We have had a few reasons to ponder this in recent months. Anyone familiar with The Telecoms Security Review will know that telecommunication providers now have obligations to meet determined by the tier they fall into. The tiers are based on the Ofcom system for assigning industry levies, and this uses ‘relevant turnover’ figures.
At first glance this seems to make sense, the larger businesses in theory have the resource and expertise to comply with the highest of requirements and the budget to deal with imposed tests and audits. However, what this doesn’t take into account so neatly is the market that a provider serves.
There are a multitude of providers out there who fall into the lower tiers due to their turnover, but provide services to an array of significant customers of which the impact of security breaches can cause immeasurable damage.
A good example might be the small niche provider who has become a specialist in the healthcare sector. They may not be a vast revenue generator but the impact of a network failure will far outweigh that of a larger provider serving the residential market, for example.
The other reason this came up was during an unfortunate run on DDOS attacks last year. This clearly demonstrated how all service providers impacted by such attacks deserve equal support; regardless of provider the impact on users was just as serious, especially given the diverse customer base smaller innovative providers have a tendency to serve.
Removing barriers for smaller providers
Our mission has always been to provide a flexible and affordable way for telecom service providers to enter the industry, utilising our core network features to build solutions for their customer base. With many of our clients growing alongside us we are proud to have many of our first clients still on the network today.
The key thing is that the size of the business cannot determine the value of the service it provides and so we endeavour to keep our minimum commitment low enough to not be a barrier, but high enough to ensure we have a sustainable business model and with that in mind we offer a variety of packages and pricing deals. The flexibility to move between packages as business ebbs and flows is also beneficial in what can be an uncertain marketplace.
With numbering packages starting from £60/month and a minimum prepayment of £250 for outbound calls we can find a way to work with most potential clients, each treated with the same level of support and access to our technical expertise.
Small provider, big features?
One thing that sometimes does feature more amongst our smaller clients is less in-house resource to manage in-house telecoms equipment. Where this is the case we can offer a service which leaves inbound calls on our network entirely.
Mag-Net is a proprietary product that gives you the ability to control the behaviour of incoming calls real-time, using only HTTPS commands. Once a number is assigned to Mag-Net this allows complex call control systems to be designed your side, without needing anything more advanced than a webserver and a basic scripting language like PHP. As well as allowing you to instantly request routing changes, respond to live key presses or play messages, Mag-Net also tells you when calls begin and end so you can create your own call records and statistics.
Conclusion
Does size matter? For many reasons of course it does, but to provide a reliable and robust telephony solution we think the answer is no…just make sure you partner up with someone who can support your vision and help you grow in the way you want.