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Lining Up Telecom Online
By Sarah Fister Gale
November 1, 2000
Excerpt
Best of the Web
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A hassle. That's what business owners like Paul Frick expect to find when they shop for a telecommunications service by themselves. There's that dizzying maze of possibilities. Providers with names like Startec Global, OneStar, and Qwest offer everything from basic long-distance service to T1 Internet access and Web hosting. Plus, what about crunching the numbers for all those varying rates that presuppose different usage scenarios? And who's to say which service is reliable? "All you get is the high-pressure sales pitch to change carriers," says Frick, alluding to some telecom solicitations.
No wonder TeleBright.com caught Frick's eye. TeleBright is one of several Web sites offering interactive one-stop service to businesspeople shopping for a telecom carrier. "Long distance is a big chunk of our budget," says Frick, who is a partner in Home Front Communications, a public-relations firm based in Washington, D.C. In an E-mail message he sent this past summer, Frick asked TeleBright about the savings he might achieve by switching his long-distance provider. A TeleBright representative analyzed Home Front's long-distance bill and shot back the names of a dozen carriers that could beat the firm's average monthly outlay of $1,000.
"It was a no-brainer," says Frick, who chose a long-distance telephone company that he predicts will save him $500 a month.
Frick is in the vanguard of executives who are going online to shop for telecom services. But if the projections of Forrester Research, a high-tech-research company based in Cambridge, Mass., prove right, he'll soon be part of a new majority. Some 65% of U.S. businesses plan to buy some of their telecom services online by 2002, predicts a recent Forrester report, Buying into Telecom Online. Online sales of telecom services to businesses will amount to $47 billion in 2004, compared with $900 million this year, according to the report.
TeleBright, based in Rockville, Md., and Web sites like it serve as funnels that direct customers to telecom-service providers with which they've formed partnerships. Some sites invite customers to browse online databases that comprise packages of telecom services. (TeleBright falls into that category.) Others, such as Demandline.com, enable buyers to pool their requests with like-minded businesses and obtain customized bids at lower rates. The sites earn fees from the providers when they land customers.
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