Can a proposition be too good to be true?

You can slice a huge chunk off your phone bill, by cutting your landline to mobile call (L2M) costs by perhaps as much as 50%.

Typically you’ll pay between 6p and 20p per minute for a L2M call depending on your deal with your incumbent telephone service provider. For many businesses it’s around 10p/min.

Part of the reason for this is that there is flat charge of about 5.9p/min for transferring between the BT network and the mobile network, the rest is down to your usage level.

By installing a Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) hub to your telephone switch you can route calls to mobiles directly out onto the mobile network and avoid the BT network and the fixed 5.9p/min transfer charge.



The FMC hubs are basically a rack of mobile phones with smart software to handle the calls, monitoring and reporting. They are not cheap pieces of kit, and require a site survey and installation to ensure that there is good connectivity to the mobile network.

BUT you can get the kit installed FREE on a managed service basis if you sign up for a year with minimum commitment of 20k mobile mins/month. The price per minute depends on the monthly volume commitment and ranges from 3.5p/min to 5.5p/min, which is close to halving your cost. Even at 20k mins/month that could be worth over £12k per annum SAVED.

I’ve been looking for the “gotcha” …….

Maybe signing up for an annual commitment? But why wouldn’t you if you’re going to save over £10k in the year.

It only applies to businesses making a significant number of L2M calls per month? Well it’s not difficult to establish what your usage is – just take a look at your last quarters phone bill to see the L2M usage and the cost per minute.

What if it fails? or the connection to the mobile network is dropped? Well the system fails over back to routing via the PSTN, more expensive but no lost connectivity. It can even offer a backup for landline to landline calls if the PSTN network fails.

Is it legal? Yes, a FMC hub is even being used by the Ministry of Justice and a number of police forces!

Does it work with all mobile operators? The connection service is provided by Orange and works with all other networks.

With so much emphasis on cost savings why doesn’t everyone implement this?
Is it too good to be true?

More for less

In corporate life I used to commission work from many different types of contractors and used to judge their value by looking at the ROI or business benefit their work produced, cost was of secondary importance provided there was a budget available. We had some great results along with some disappointments, overall I am quite proud of my achievements.

Now in a small business every penny counts and there are no budgets as such - so I have found it necessary to delve into contractors’ time and materials and learnt a huge lesson as a result.

You can do so much more with so much less, and how much better would the ROI have been if I had dived into the detail and understood the minutia of the work – the devil is as they say in the detail.