Pink Connect Blog

Archive for the ‘IT’ Category

Norwich A47 in the Snow

The current heavy snowfall has made it difficult for many organisations to operate as normal. Whilst employees struggle to access their workplace, desk phones are ringing unanswered as customers and suppliers try to place orders, reschedule appointments or seek customer service. As a result, business profit can suffer heavily.

There is one local business however who’s profits have certainly not suffered. Norwich based business telecoms company Pink Connect have been inundated with calls from companies wanting to set up their employees who are stranded at home as remote workers.

Whatever the weather, Pink Connect has a solution that means those calls will be answered, even if no one makes it into the workplace!

Danny Snelling, Director of the firm said “We have given our customers an easy to use web page which enables complete control of where your numbers ring and for how long. It even allows one number to ring at multiple locations so you can share the answering between those who’ve made it into the office and those remote workers who are snowed under.”

There is also access to a host of extra features which come in handy in times like these such as the ability to send calls to a recorded announcement giving advice or information, network based call queuing to deal with excessive demand and secure access to office IT networks.

One group of companies to benifit from this treatment is The Website Design Centre who has branches in Norwich, Attleborough, Gt Yarmouth, London, Birmingham and Pontypridd. They have been plagued with staff not being able to get in. Director for the firm Daniel Arpels commented “Pink Connect really did come to our rescue and have allowed us to carry on regardless of who makes it into the office”.

With travel chaos, school closures and workplace inaccessibility so widespread – there has never been a better time to look into the option to have employees working from home. Less travel also means you’re doing your bit for the environment and it will surely come in handy when this cold weather turns into staff illnesses.

If you’d like to find out more on this very helpful and inexpensive service call Pink Connect today on 01603 510710.

As it heads towards that time of week when our roads and our broadband clog up with sheer weight of traffic and everything runs slow, Raj Deokar (Pink Connect Northampton) has some words of advice on how to improve your broadband connection speed.

There are many factors that affect speed of broadband. Some of the key ones are:

Read the rest of this entry »

Speed up your world today with Superfast Fibre Business Broadband

Pink Connect, has seized the opportunity provided by the roll out of fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) to make high upstream business-grade broadband affordable to small businesses looking to compete in an increasingly data-hungry environment.

Benefits of Pink Fibre Pro

• Up to 20 times faster upload than standard business broadband
• Superfast service at cost effective rates
• Improve your business efficiency whilst reducing cost
• Up to 10mb upload speed
• Guaranteed minimum 12mb download throughput
• No fair usage policy

FTTC’s upload speeds of up to 10Mbps enable businesses to use video, voice or VPN technology more easily and will support a range of high-data demand applications whilst improvements in download speed make  fibre considerably faster than any standard broadband connection.

Managing Director, James, says,  “Getting your business on the Next Generation Network is a simple enough once the fibre has been run to a cabinet near you. We send an engineer to your premises to set the new connection and install a vDSL (very high speed DSL) modem. The whole installation process takes about 10 days from order to live connection and it costs a lot less than it used to when businesses looking for high speeds paid a high price for uncontended, dedicated solutions like EFM or Leased Lines.

Put simply Pink Connect just provided their usual high quality broadband on another line and then used a clever box of tricks to combine the two supplies together to make one super efficient service.

Russell Taylor Director at the firm said the following….

“We approached Danny Snelling, who is the director at Pink Connect (Norfolk), to discuss the possibility of faster and more reliable broadband as we noticed our BT line was sluggish at certain times of the day, this was interfering with normal day to day operations.

As a firm of Independent Financial Advisers we keep an active eye on what the Pension and investment markets are doing and our systems can be quite demanding on the broadband, so it was time to discuss options, without ‘breaking the bank’ (no pun intended).

Broadband is definitely quicker and more consistent, especially when backups are running in busy times, so we are very pleased.”

If you’d like to speed up your broadband, no matter where you are, give Pink Connect a call for a no hassle discussion on what we can do for you.

Pink Connect (Norfolk) Ltd 01603 510710

Businesses often overlook the value of keeping their telephone lines up and running.

Some will simply be unaware of the options in place to reduce the time in which a fault on the line can be resolved.

Inbound and Outbound calls, Fax, PDQ, Alarm and Broadband are just some of the services telephone lines are used for within a business. Ideally you would like your lines up and running continuously, without any problems at all. However, faults can occur at any point.

That’s where Care Levels come into place. When you log a fault, the network will respond to a fault based on a priority determined by its Care Level. The different care levels are:

Read the rest of this entry »

Pink Connect Ltd is a family business with a firm commitment to long term customer relationships. Directors Gisela and James Pink established the Cotswold based telecommunications business more than ten years ago but still have almost all their customers from the early days.

James recently commented “Our customers know and trust us to supply reliable business communications and power. They usually call us whenever they have a need for further services or equipment. These requests have resulted in the broad range of business services we now offer. Pretty much anything a business needs, from phone lines and systems, Business Mobile, IT, Networking, Servers, Broadband, EPOS and Commercial Power are now covered in our product range. Customers really appreciate our straightforward, honest approach and love our customer service”.

Pink Connect can be contacted on 0845 450 9393.

Net Neutrality.  Many of you may not have heard this term before, but it is a term that may become very common in the new decade.  Simply put, it is an extension of “freedom of speech”.  As the internet becomes more and more common, the quality of service will drop correspondingly.  Back haul networks will require a higher bandwidth throughput, and datacenters will require increased capacities.  To stop this occurring, some people have brought forward a tiered system where users will pay more for better access, and those who pay less will be restricted from certain services and/or have less prioritised connections.  This would go against all the principles of Net Neutrality.  Many high profile figures have spoken out in favour of Net Neutrality, such as Tim Berners-Lee, who is generally acknowledged as the creator of the Web.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the increasing popularity of email, the sending and receiving of faxes is a dwindling pass time. However in business, it is still a very necessary evil. There will always be some businesses requesting you send a fax or that they haven’t got a scanner to email something to you.

To add to this frustration you’re paying all that money for an additional phone line, the machine frequently jams, it runs out of ink, it eats paper, it takes up valuable office space and you usually have to print off a paper copy from your computer anyway which is just plain wasteful.

So whats the answer?

Intelligas, who supply gas safety and control systems have found the answer in Pink Connects Fax2Email service.

Like most companies Intelligas had a separate phone line attached to a clunky old fax machine that frequently jammed and ran out of ink. One call to Pink Connect and we had them up and running on Fax2Email. They were then able to cancel the BT line (that was costing £180 p/a), and ditch the fax machine all together.

This product has two parts…

1. Fax2Email will receive a fax to any geographic number, convert it to PDF format and then deliver to your inbox (Emails can be delivered to multiple emails addresses).

2. Email2Fax allows you to send faxes to: “FAXNUMBER@fax.pinkconnect.com” in any of 27 different electronic formats which will then be transmitted by fax to the recipient and a delivery report produced and sent back to the senders email address.

The service is available with nationwide geographic numbers and we are even able to port your exisitng fax numbers. (For Intelligas we found a new number a few digits away from their existing 0845 Phone number).

All this costs just £7.50 per month saving a fortune on line rental, paper, ink, time, space and hassle.

Here’s what Andrew Dickenson, Managing Director for Intelligas had to say about Pink Connect…..

“Excellent service thanks. Informed every step of the way and we’ve already used the service a few times and got rid of that horrible old machine!

Using pink connect for the first time was an easy and hassle free experience, i’ll certainly be revisiting their site to see what other services my business can benefit from in the future, I highly reccommend this professional supplier to enhance the media & communication needs of any business.”

To find out more about Intelligas and what they get up to please visit their website or give Andrew a call or how about a fax???

www.intelligas.co.uk
T: 0845 004 2496
F: 0845 862 2496

R.P.Lovatt Insurance have again chosen their long term Communication suppliers Pink Connect in a deal that includes all lines, calls, mobiles, phone systems, ADSL and IT infrastructure. With this deal, Marc Lovatt has fixed the cost of his partnership’s Communication and IT budget for the next five years. Marc said “Pink Connect have been our chosen suppliers for over eight years now. As we have grown they have expanded our systems ahead of demand ensuring we always have the tools for the job. I am delighted to have secured their comprehensive services at a fixed cost with this innovative agreement. I recommend Pink Connect to any company wanting the best solution for their business communications”.

Have a look at the back of your TV.  How many wires can you see?  Three, four, maybe more if you have several devices plugged in.  Of course each device will have a power cable, and a video and/or sound output.  And maybe a network connection in the case of Blu-Ray Players, and consoles.  This all makes quite a mess, but have no fear, the back of your TV, your PC, or whatever other video devices you may own will soon be much tidier, with the introduction of HDBaseT.

What is HDBaseT?  It is the same cable you use to connect to the internet.  Old technology… on the way out – or is it?  HDBaseT Alliance, the standardisation committee for 100BaseT ethernet cable, and now the new HDBaseT standard, are relaunching the humble cable as a solve-all solution.  One cable will be able to supply 100Mbit/s Networking,  HD video, Lossless (HD) Audio, Control Signals (like a remote control) and most importantly up to one hundred Watts of power.  I am sure you have already realised the implications of this, but I will go through a few benefits of this new technology.

Imagine you get your office cabled with Cat5e, sockets all along the walls.  Into these sockets you can plug in almost anything, without worrying about power supplies, or stretching other cables.  Projectors, screens, even small laptops could be easily moved from room to room as required, without the hassle of power cables and transformers.  Plug in a single cable and you get access to everything you need.  It would be easy to set up shared resources such as DVR/Blu-Ray or other video devices and then access them from any room linked into the same network, without moving the device.

One area this technology could really become useful is CCTV systems, where a single cable can run out to each camera, carrying everything necessary.  Cameras could be easily moved on a random rotation, simply by plugging into a close Ethernet port.  Network attached storage devices are another technology which would benefit, and could be easily moved around the building, no longer needing to be close to a power point.  More advanced telephone systems could all be connected with a single cable.  The potential for a connector like this is limited only by our imagination, and we can think up some crazy things!  Whatever business you are in, HDBaseT cabling will most likely be in your future.