Long Distance

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FAQ 6 

How to take Advantage of the Fantastic International rates offered by CongniWorld with your existing business PBX or Key system with out violating your existing carrier contract.

In many businesses you may have agreed to and signed up for a contract that offered significant saving over what you were paying for long distance at the time.  Now you find, by searching on this site and others, that the cost of long distance has dropped even further leaving you stuck paying higher fees until your contract expires.  It is still possible to take advantage of some of the newly available savings without violating your existing contract and incurring cancellation fees.

In this document we will focus on International calls although your calling pattern may actually demonstrate similar savings in other area codes.

Most business Key Systems and PBX telephone systems now have a feature called "Least Cost Routing" (LCR) or "Automatic Route Selection" (ARS).  Although this feature may not be implemented in your system, most systems have it available and most of these are using a subset of it.

Least Cost Routing, as the name implies, is designed to provide you with the ability to choose the least expensive route for making a particular phone call.  These calls can generally be defined as:

You (or your PBX/Key system vendor) define for your system what is considered a least expensive call path.  The system cannot know what the charges are for any given line on its' own.

Your PBX or Key system can be programmed to route these calls out less expensive routes.

Because you have a contract or perhaps just because your current carrier is already providing you with the best rates available for the areas you call most, you may not want to change carriers.  However you may have found that CogniWorld is offering a far less expensive rate for international calling.  This is the exact reason Least Cost Routing was created.

First Things First

The first thing you need to do is review your contract.  You need to understand what you are contracted for.  Most contracts require you to use a minimum of time.  If you fall under the minimum, you still are required to pay for it.  So know what your contract says.

Next, review your bills.  Most companies will find that they are over the minimum requirements by a substantial amount.  This offers even more potential savings and I'll review that latter on..

Now take a look at your international calling on your bill.  What is it?  For the purpose of this article, these are the calls we are targeting.

Change One Line to CongniWorld

Now you'll need to identify one of your analog lines.   Sign this line up with CongniWorld. 

Now your PBX or Key system vendor will be able to program your system to route over the less expensive CongniWorld line first for international calls and if that line is busy, route the call over the rest of your calls over your higher priced lines.  Your employees will not now the difference and you'll instantly start saving money.

Saving Even More Money

As I mentioned earlier, if you are spending far more than your carrier contract requires, all you need to do is add more lines the CongniWorld line pool.  Have your vendor select these lines as your first choice for long distance calling and then overflow to your existing lines.  Be Careful!  You don't want to carve so much traffic off of your contracted lines that you fall below your minimum requirements.

 Conclusion

By utilizing the existing features of your business telephone system you can still save money over higher contracted rates.

Least Cost Routing (LCR) is available for the following sytems: