Insight

In the current challenging economic climate, many organisations face an urgent need to secure costs savings in all areas of their business. As a major cost element within the IT budget, network and telecoms costs are a key area to seek these cost savings. The key question is how to unlock these cost savings, and quickly.As the UK’s largest independent network and telecoms consultancy, TNC has delivered hundreds of cost saving programmes for some of the UK’s leading organisations.The purpose of this article is to explore in depth one of the…

Introduction For many organisations, 2020 will be historic for all the wrong reasons. As a result of lost trading days during lockdown, ongoing employee health and safety concerns, and a slower than expected economic recovery, organisations are rightly scrutinising every pound they spend or plan to spend in the coming years. With 2020 revenues by and large down, and uncertainty around the future trading landscape, CFOs will be challenged to make cuts in all areas of the business. One area that is traditionally top of the list when it comes to cost…

Watch the video recording of TNC's Down The Wire Podcast below. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced an almost-immediate switch to remote working for many organisations. Despite most of these companies already having a secure remote access solution, the majority of them were not designed to cater for their entire workforce, therefore we have seen our customers needing to replace, or supplement, their existing capabilities with interim solutions.It is very likely that increased home working will become the “new norm” for many businesses, therefore…

For most network and telecoms services, TNC has continued to see downward pressure on price points for several years with only the retirement of services or floors imposed by regulation preventing some services from being impacted. Whether it’s the cost of Ethernet circuits, SD-WAN overlay, mobile data, or traditional pence per minute voice costs, there is always an opportunity to reduce costs to align to the market, if you are not constrained by your contract.For many businesses, the impact of the pandemic on revenues means the usual desire…

As part of TNC’s continuing series of articles exploring strategies to drive cost savings in network, telecoms, and mobility services, this article will focus on benchmarking, with all its costs, risks, and opportunities. For organisations in mid-contract, benchmarking is one of the best ways to secure cost savings, particularly given that pricing for most network, telecoms, and mobility services is falling fast. However, executing a benchmarking process can be very challenging. Therefore, we are going to focus this article on how to benchmark…

The New Normal The COVID-19 pandemic has forced an almost-immediate switch to remote working for many organisations.  Despite most of these organisations already having a secure remote access solution, the majority of them were not designed to cater for such a large percentage of their workforce, therefore we have seen our customers needing to replace, or supplement, their existing capabilities with interim solutions.  Although the move to mass home working has largely been an unplanned activity, many of our customers have observed a number…

The current COVID19 situation has shone a light on many an organisation’s ability to fulfil its customer contact centre obligations due to a lack of resilience, accessibility and capability to adequately operate under the unprecedented circumstances. Almost every customer-facing organisation has some form of contact centre offering. In fact, a recent study indicated there are approximately 6,000 contact centres housing 700,000 agents in the UK alone.

As I sit at home writing this, it is almost exactly a month since Boris Johnson’s announcement to officially put the UK into lockdown. In that time, TNC’s customers have had to make decisions about shutting sites, furloughing staff, renewing supplier contracts, continuing with tender processes, reducing costs, ensuring business continuity, and implementing unexpectedly large working from home & unified comms processes to very urgent deadlines. On a lot of fronts, there is still much to be done technically in the here and now. But for many…

The current challenging circumstances have created a huge paradox for many organisations – the criticality of the network to keep the organisation trading has never been greater, but the ability to think and act strategically is hugely constrained. The key question therefore is how should the thoughtful leader act to deliver the best results?With over 15 years’ experience working alongside some of the UK’s largest and most demanding organisations, TNC has a unique window into the thoughts and actions of many IT leaders. Engaging with them…

Roaming Usage dramatically reduced. Covid-19 lockdowns, and travel restrictions have brought an end to roaming for nearly all of TNC’s customers. In recent years European users have generally moved to light cost roaming within Europe thanks to the EU’s ‘Roam Like At Home’ (RLAH) legislation i.e. calls and data should cost the same whether made from your domestic country or from another EU country. Some providers have also added supplementary countries to the list - most often countries like Switzerland and Turkey. However, for those organisations…

In the current challenging economic circumstances, many organisations face an urgent need to secure costs savings in all areas of their business. As a major cost element within the IT budget, network and telecoms costs are a key area to seek these cost savings. The key question is how to unlock these cost savings, and quickly. As the UK’s largest independent network and telecoms consultancy, TNC has delivered hundreds of cost saving programmes for some of the UK’s leading organisations. The purpose of this article is to crystallise the approaches…

NetOps has been derived from the more commonly known term DevOps. Amazon, one of the leading adopters of the DevOps culture and providers of DevOps capabilities defines DevOps as “the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organisation’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organisations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.” Although DevOps has been around for some time now, many…

As many of our customers start to prepare for the possibility of a widespread COVID-19 outbreak TNC has put together a brief checklist of things that organisations could do to plan, prepare and take action to help ensure business can operate as optimally as possible.Plan & PrepareHome working – Due to the likelihood of self-isolation or the introduction on the restriction of travel, it is highly likely many organisations will be putting their home working solutions under more intense strain than usual. We would encourage all our customers…

TNC's expert telecoms consultants answer your burning questions on the subject of whether to renew your telecoms contract, or run a competitive tender process. Join Head of Consulting, Adrian Joyce, and Principal Consultant, Clare Tyndall.  The questions are broken down into 4 videos which are 5 minutes or less in length, as you can see below. 

At the end of 2019 TNC looked back and analysed some of its customers buying trends over the past year. Alongside increased adoption of SD-WAN, UCaaS, and CCaaS, one of the other very interesting trends is an increased adoption of cloud security services, either as point solution to enforce security, compliance, and governance policies for cloud applications, or as full cloud security stacks. In this whitepaper TNC explores what a Cloud Security Service is, how it fits in today, and what is changing to make it become even more relevant in the future.…

Remember when you first heard your own voice recorded and played back to you, and you turned to your friends and said “I don't sound like that do I?” and they all say yes? It turns out, lots of people feel the same when they first start seeing themselves in that little window during a video conference. However, it also seems that the world is very quickly finding that the depth and detail that you can witness in others during a high quality video conference is invaluable, and we quickly learn to stop looking at ourselves as the value of seeing…

As we begin a new year and a new decade, the sense of excitement, expectation and speed of technology change and innovation across many network and telecoms service towers has never been so strong. In the WAN space, we are seeing a seismic shift from traditional MPLS to Internet-based networks, partly as a result of key applications shifting to the cloud, but also as a result of maturing SD-WAN product offerings and converged network and security capabilities. The concept of “cloud native networks” with multi-cloud capabilities is also rising…

TNC's telecoms consultants and senior leaders discuss how Network Transition is changing in 2020. Tune in to hear expert insight from John Waterhouse, CEO, and Clare Tyndall, Principal Consultant.Below are videos Part 1 - 4, each answering questions. Please do watch them in order, or choose the video most closely related to your specific interests. 

5G is one of the most hyped technologies of recent times, so let’s start with a quote that fully captures that hype about just how massive 5G is going to be: “5G is the fundamental platform for the fourth industrial revolution and will become an integral part of societies and civil infrastructures, just like roads, energy and transportation.” So, if 5G really is going to be massive, there must be loads of use cases, right? Well, sort of, but the reality is much more complicated.