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Tom Bloxham of Bloxham Printers of York tells it like it is:
“I’ve never wanted to spend any money unless I have to. I bought a Nortel Nortsar switchboard in the 1980’s when a man from British Telecom said it would suit me - and it has. It’s worked continuously for over a quarter of a century. It had 3 incoming lines and 6 extensions. Mary, my receptionist has been taking all the calls for all that time.
The trouble was that Mary was due to retire and it was getting a bit old fashioned - it didn’t do things like DDI or call queuing or anything else fancy. But I reckoned it would cost me a bomb to change it. So I tried to talk to the man from BT and they wouldn’t give me his number.
So I had a bit of a poke around on the Internet and I found this crowd called Birchills Telecom. They said I could have new phones and connect them into the Internet so I wouldn’t have to buy a new switchboard - ever. I liked the sound of that. They said I could keep my old telephone numbers and put them on to the new fancy phones that would do all sorts of clever things.
So Birchills Telecom upgraded my Broadband to give me something they called quality of service – so I got a better Broadband as well. They sent me 5 phones because I never really used the one extension any way. I used to pay £45 a month or something like that to BT for the incoming lines but now I was paying £25 a month for a far better service. The cost of my Broadband was a bit more but the speed was well worth it.
The calls are a lot cheaper of course than BT and with the capped plan I joined I can chat to mobiles for ages for 20p. The clincher though is that all calls through the Birchills Telecom network are free and my main paper supplier has just signed up – so I can talk to him for free all day.
Oh then there’s the fax. I don’t need a separate fax line any more and that’s another £15 a month or something saved. So I’m saving some money, Mary’s replacement is happy and I’m busy trying to get new printing orders.”
Tom Bloxham
May 2009
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