Smart Telecom claims to be the fastest growing provider of residential, small business and corporate telecommunication services in Ireland. Established in 2000, the company has recently been busy garnering public attention through a prominent television advertising campaign and a legal confrontation with regulator Comreg over the latter’s decision to cancel its original award of the last 3G mobile phone licence in Ireland to Smart Telecom in November.
It has also been busy laying down a marker for the small business market. In January, Smart Telecom signed a deal with IBM that expanded its capabilities beyond the traditional telecommunications arena to business-based technology solutions. These included IBM hosting and managed services, online back-up and recovery of data, business continuity, full network management, a suite of security services and full desktop managed services.
Sizing up small business
The deal was particularly targeted at the small business part of the market, bringing Smart Telecom into direct competition with Eircom Total ICT, a point made at the time by director of corporate business John Acton, who suggested the tie-up with IBM gave Smart Telecom an edge over its rival.
“IBM is celebrating 50 years in Ireland. It’s in all levels of the business and has a very well established brand,” he said. “Is Eircom going to emulate that overnight?”
On the back of the IBM deal, Smart Telecom is keen to stress its credentials as a provider for small business. It has a package of broadband services aimed specifically at small businesses that offer speeds of up to 6Mbit/sec. It claims the “always on” service allows Irish businesses to use broadband to increase efficiencies in their business “at realistic costs and usable speeds”. Smart Telecom also guarantees that “unlike other broadband offerings…our broadband network will always remain completely uncongested, so you will not experience slowdowns at peak times”.
The packages are split into platinum (6Mbit/sec), gold (5Mbit/sec), silver (4Mbit/sec) and bronze (3Mbit/sec) and start from €45 a month ex VAT. All include free connection, free line rental, a free 4-port router, 25 free e-mail addresses, 50Mb free Unix hosting and single domain name hosting.
Broadband is only the beginning
But Acton is keen to stress there’s more to Smart Telecom than broadband because broadband itself is only the start of the process. “Broadband means convergence – it’s about allowing organisations to use connectivity to access multiple applications over a single connection. Beyond the initial areas of e-mail and web surfing, it allows organisations to use tools to drive costs out of the business with areas such as internet telephony or VoIP. If you can have a single voice and data connection, you can dramatically cut the cost of your phone bill.”
Appear to be bigger
Among Smart Telecom’s hosted solutions is a PABX that gives small companies the functionality and appearance of larger organisations with services such as number diverting and voice recognition. “They can download a piece of software onto their computers and pay a relative charge per head to get something delivered to them over broadband which typically used to cost tens of thousands of euros,” Acton claims.
Broadband also gives small businesses access to services such as hosted security, back-up and restore, spam filtering, privacy and e-mail protection. “It’s all about communication,” Acton argues. “If you can access information more quickly, you can pass it on more quickly. The more you speed up the process, the more efficient you become. And in their individual industries, businesses will also be able to access B2B applications, marketplaces, tendering opportunities – there are all sorts of applications available.”
VPN in vogue
As small businesses become more sophisticated in their requirements in areas such as networking with their clients and suppliers, it opens them up to other technologies, Acton believes, such as virtual private networks (VPNs). “We have a number of products in place that allow organisations to create a virtual private network between their sites,” he says, citing the example of a recruitment business with 14 small offices dotted around the country. “We’ve connected them all into their own VPN which has allowed them all to connect to and communicate with each other in a ubiquitous fashion.”
Advanced network
Smart Telecom claims to have developed “Ireland’s most sophisticated IP communications network” based on fibre ring architectures. It is rolling out a national fibre network based on its ownership of the T50, a 140km fibre ring around the M50 in Dublin which covers all the major business parks and runs into commercial zones within the city centre, and the 27 metropolitan area networks (MANs) around Ireland as they go live.
According to Acton, it can also bring fibre direct to business premises by connecting all a customer’s sites with Ethernet using its E-lan product, described by Smart Telecom as “Ireland’s first nationwide, multipoint, Ethernet LAN extension service”. E-lan can provide connection speeds ranging from 64Kbit/sec to 1Gbit/sec.
The ability to offer bandwidth on demand is another big factor. Acton claims that, when customers want extra bandwidth, they can ring Smart Telecom and it can provide it there and then. There’s no charge for the upgrade, only for the extra bandwidth. This is another aspect it brings to the IBM deal: Smart Telecom provides bandwidth on demand and IBM provides services on demand.
Summing up Smart Telecom’s proposition for small businesses, Acton concludes: “We’re giving them higher levels of functionality and capacity, we’re giving them the ability to increase their capacity on demand and providing them with a flexibility they haven’t had before (but) at a much lower cost.”
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