Telecom
Telecom Fiji’s New Voice
Helping Businesses Reduce Phone Bills.
Moving ahead with the latest information technology in the market is the way Carpenters Fiji is approaching the year 2002. Having signed a $F1 million agreement with Telecom Fiji Limited for the setting up of the Voice Over Internet Protocol, Carpenters Fiji is now seen as one of the first few Fiji companies to have taken advantage of the latest in information technology.
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The Voice Over Internet Protocol or VoIP is the latest in the brand of telecommunication systems that is now available for businesses that want to keep their phone bills low while increasing worker productivity. “Internet protocol is data traffic that runs through your leased lines. Like with Internet services you’re just putting through data on a line, with voice it’s putting a voice over the telephone line,” says Salote Uluinaceva, Telecom Fiji’s acting marketing manager.
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VoIP does not require company employees to dial the normal numbers. Instead workers in a district office will only have to dial extension numbers of their counterparts in another town to speak to them. “That means that if Carpenters Suva needs to call Carpenters Nadi they just dial the number like an internal extension instead of having to dial the actual phone number,” says Uluinaceva. “What’s happening with Internet protocol is that we are actually running a voice traffic on the data circuits.”
Government has encouraged the system because it reckons it is a cost-cutting measure for customers.
Director of Telecommunications Josua Turaganivalu says Telecom Fiji should now be extending the service to the average consumer and not restrict it to big businesses.
“Government is trying to pursue a policy where we want to reduce costs for customers and make life easier for them,” he said. Turaganivalu says VoIP is much cheaper because it can do two things at the same time.
Telecom Fiji, however, disagrees and says that the market is too small to expand the system.
Another company that uses a similar Internet-based system is the Fiji Sugar Corporation (FSC), which has described it as a big saving. Although FSC could not disclose how much it has saved, company spokesperson Filipe Kakaivalu says since the company started using the new system there has been huge savings in telephone bills.
Carpenters Fiji had put out a tender for the upgrading of its information technology services and the award was given to Telecom Fiji Limited, which led to the signing of the F$1 million agreement in October.
“Carpenters pays us a certain amount of money every month for the leased lines which they rent from us and what they do is they run all their data and voice traffic on these leased line,” Uluinaceva says. “What that means is that they are not paying us charges for regional calls like trunk calls, they just pay that certain amount every month.
“It sounds very complicated, but what it actually is, is just using the voice through the data circuit instead of running through the normal telephone lines, so you just have a package for the company for data and voice circuits and they just pay us money every month,” she said.
Businesses that will get to use this service will not have to worry about high telephone bills because everything is paid for when the company pays Telecom Fiji for their leased lines.
