Telecom Expense Audit and Consulting Advice you need to know in 2024

Telecom audits identify billing errors, faulty network charges, unused voice lines, benchmark rate reviews, and provide optimization of services in your business.  Most enterprises neglect to perform a telecom audit, as they do not have the bandwidth (no pun intended) or lack a deep understanding of where to begin.  Using a Telecom Consulting firm will quickly assess, in 2-3 hours, any potential savings and cursory errors within their accounts. Often, during examination of the results following a Telecom Audit, organizations feel they need a Telecom Expense Management system implemented to manage and track services.  However, this can be a losing approach if you have not truly identified the root cause of telecom spend issues.  If you have individuals buying telecom circuits form Tier-1 ISPs without a governance process, the Telecom Expense Management platform will continue to pay the bill, but not fix the governance gap.

Telecom Expense Management continues to grow as an industry focus and will do so over the next 8-10 years.  Many enterprises have financial and technical opportunities to reduce operational costs while improving functionality.  Gartner equally weighs in on this focus as industry powerhouses drive adoption and governance in the market both with consulting and automation.  In 2025-225 it is paramount enterprises look to a Telecom Consultant to support areas to reduce costs, re-design infrastructure and place an emphasis on maniacal FinOpS practices as services continue as a service in cloud.  This does not mean decisions, contracts and approaches were incorrect the past 2-5 years at all.  The environmental landscape changes in telecom every 12 months now and consultant can bridge the every modifying network.  

What does a Telecom Consultant do?

The role of a telecom consultant is an unbiased 3rd party who is technical and understands the business components of carrier contracts and terms.  A good Telecom Consultant is typically a former Engineer with experience at a major telecom carrier, and fully understands how to support your business.   They work in an unbiased fashion to provide you with the technology, design, and pricing so you can make an informed decision for your business, independently. 

The telecom consultant is not a reseller; therefore, they are not biased to which provider you select. Even if it may not be the best provider for other organizations, selecting the correct carrier that is most suited for your business should be the ultimate objective. The most important factor to understand is that you are trying to solve your use case, and that should be the number one focus of any carrier.  The telecom consultant should provide you with guidance on this goal, similarly to how a real estate broker should not show you an urban condominium if you are looking for a house in the suburbs.

What are Telecom Consultant Responsibilities?

1. Identify all network and voice spend.
2. Review current contract terms, as well as the Monthly Recurring Costs
3. Outline a logical Diagram of the WAN, and Voice architecture
4. Qualify cost optimization strategies and simplification.
5. Benchmark existing services via a Network RFP, or other means to lower costs, and increase favorable terms

Another benefit that a telecom consultant can provide is a channel partner, or a consultative service, which are typically free of charge. This occurs when a telecom consultant has numerous unbiased relationships with other telecom carriers. Usually, those carrier relationships number well over 100, and consist of Tier 1 ISPs, competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), and other small regional players who may have dark fiber, or other niche services in a particular metro region. Essentially, the consultant can utilize everyone else’s technology, and is not a reseller. Frequently, customers ask Macronet Services to be a reseller, and one of the main reasons why we decline is that we feel we would be putting a stake in the ground and show bias towards a particular technology. So much has changed within the telecom industry over the last 20 years, and things move rapidly and can modify overnight. If Macronet Services is acting as a complete reseller, this does not allow us to either pivot away from a technology, or search for other diverse options. 

Macronet Services attempts to maintain strategic relationships across as many carriers as possible. We understand how to leverage those relationships into service level agreements, payment terms and other force majeure events that you would expect in a contract. This enables customers to allow us to tackle these issues while leveraging the experience that we have provided to other clients. 

We can simply benchmark and explain to a customer which carriers will play ball in certain areas suitable for their business. Often, certain carriers have higher tax charges, or may have hidden fees and renewal options that are embedded deeply into the fine print.  If your organization is over-budget in spend, or cash strapped for time to deploy an environment, you may not see some of those hard-to-find areas of savings.  When working with Macronet Services, we can essentially provide you with an outlay of what we have seen the carriers provide to other customers for price, terms and other negotiable items.   Again, you as the client are still making the decision on which provider to choose or stay with; it is our job to provide you with facts.  Essentially, we serve as a technical consultant, so you can focus on your day-to-day and not be bogged down by these business decisions. Additionally, utilizing Macronet Services as a telecom consultant does provide you with advantages because we design and help negotiate various wide area networks, voice architectures, and cloud networks daily. You may only be looking at your network every 24-36 months to renew, refresh, and reprice. To go through that entire process at one point in time, you will already have a disadvantage because you simply will not have the bandwidth to perform the research.

Given the sheer volume of designs, RFPs, and other factors that we have worked through on a day-to-day basis with carriers, and clients, taking advantage of our extensive experience is a no brainer. It is no different than you trying to fix your own vehicle. You can certainly work on your brakes, change your oil, and add washer fluid, but if you have never done these things before, the first thing you will likely do is Google and watch how to videos. This may be effective for simple vehicle maintenance. However, if you needed to swap out a transmission, or change a head gasket, you would likely want to leverage somebody that is reputable, certified, has the proper tools and experience to ensure your vehicle is repaired properly. Not only will you get the benefits of efficiency by the professional making the complex repairs, but you will also get the best price, and you can leverage your time to spend elsewhere. 

We have also worked directly with many telecom carriers across the globe to help them enhance their product set. Due to the volume of customers we work with, we are frequently invited to sit on committees or internal review boards with the carriers themselves, so they can receive a 360-feedback loop from the client or the industry.  This allows the carrier(s) to shape their product, improve their backbone and provide other services which makes them much more competitive, but also provides a better customer support experience. It is not uncommon for our principals at Macronet Services to be asked how to deliver services out to the market. Unfortunately, it is difficult for product teams to spend time out in the field speaking to hundreds of customers. They will leverage a company like Macronet Services as a telecom consultant, free of charge, to provide feedback and we feel this is important for clients.  This must be an ongoing ecosystem, allowing everyone to really focus on delivering quality services. If you think about the telecom industry, their margins specifically have eroded over the last 20 years compared to a SAS.  SAS clearly earns much greater margins for their business. Therefore, they can reinvest into their business; whether it’s people, products or processes. When you are a carrier and your telecom margins are so small due to the industry having driven your pricing down, it is very difficult to reinvest back into the business.   Therefore, it is very important that they get it right the first time when supporting customers.  Hedging bets based on a hunch is not an option, as they need real data. This is why Macronet Services prides itself on being on customer advisory boards, and other scenarios where we can offer feedback into the workstream for carriers. Additionally, this is also important because when it comes time to negotiate pricing. We can leverage the number of customers we have brought to a particular carrier or multiple carriers. They know that we understand the inner workings both technically, and from a business standpoint for how to operate within that organization. This is due to our experience working with multiple customers that have procured their services. 

So, when we ask for favorable terms, a specific diverse requirement, or potentially even KMZ files to understand how that environment will work for a customer’s use case, they know that this is not a joke and that it is a serious request. As an individual customer, you are up against a large tier 1 ISP on your own with minimal history or spend. It can be very daunting, and time consuming because you do not have those established relationships. Unfortunately, what we have seen is that many customers end up hitting a wall and getting frustrated. They might believe that they chose the right product or service for them, and quite honestly, it might be. The difference can often be a resource constraint on the carrier side. So, utilizing us as a telecom consultant enables you to skip the line. We have designated teams that support these challenges.

Some of the areas that we will focus on are utilizing our extensive experience and our telecom relationships, which are supported by our tools. Our tools consist of various fiber environments and quoting mechanisms engines, as well as leveraging past designs. Areas that you should expect Macronet Services to assist with include, most importantly, making the right decision around the Technology Strategy with which you need to move forward. This could consist of a WAN technology and Internet technology, or anything else that will specifically enhance your use case. One of the areas that you really need to ensure is that the focus is on your use case, not what the carrier would like to sell you or have them direct you to a specific product based on their goals and objectives. This is 100% about you as a client, and that is most important. 

The second option is ensuring your infrastructure design is thorough. This needs to be optimized for the best return around your OpEx and your throughput as a business.  Key examples:

• Utilizing your new environment to support your customers and your brand is important. That is why products need to be simplified, with the traditional carrier acronyms that they call their products, removed. This may just be a simple wider network, internet, etc. Ensuring that all involved understand the products and technologies involved, especially you as the end customer, is essential.
• Mergers and Acquisitions: We understand that there is quite a bit of M&A that may occur in your business and positioning you to maximize these circumstances is important. Oftentimes we have worked with many organizations who are in an M&A process and engage us prior to the actual acquisition. This allows us to benchmark what they have today, look for potential opportunities for OpEx reduction and to simplify their network. This enables the integration process to become much more seamless. There are tactics and processes that we have built with carriers to invoke escalation of new services at time of(Letter Of Intent)  LOI without a penalty should something change.
• Contracts and Service Level Agreements: We have helped negotiate or have been involved with thousands of environments over the course of our careers individually, and as principals at Macronet Services. One of the things that we have learned is that every carrier may have things that they yield and shield as during the negotiation process. If it is your first time, or your legal team’s first time working with a particular carrier, there will obviously be some things that you must require to shield. It could be payment terms, force majeure, SLAs and that is very standard. We are happy to provide that level of guidance back to your legal counsel. However, there are instances where attorneys that review contracts in house simply do not understand how the technology works. Our job would be to provide guidance and enable your internal legal counsel, and you as a business owner, to make an informed decision based on understanding all the areas that have been presented to you aside from a piece of paper from the carrier. We have seen many mistakes where organizations fail to understand what things such as SLAs, renewal policies and other key components in a standard contract can or cannot impact their daily business. Conversely, setting up a proper structure out of the gate will ensure that your exposure, both financially and from a business standpoint with your customers, is protected as best as possible. Unfortunately, many organizations do not understand this. Based on the law of averages, it is most likely that a carrier will have an outage at some point within your term. One of our key recommendations is always trying to build the best fault tolerant N+1 redundant design as you can and provide cost justification. Sometimes organizations are hesitant due to the monthly expense but fail to think about what a downtime event could incur. They then discover that their recoup from the contract will not cover customer damages, which negatively impacts their brand. These are the things that you will want to consider, and we can provide guidance based on historical contracts and what some of our customers have experienced.

Telecom Consultant Backgrounds: 

We firmly believe Macronet Services is the most effective telecom consultant in the industry and has experience in the technical design, procurement and implementation of telecommunications services. We have found that many telecom consultants that exist today were former sales reps at a telecom provider and the only thing that they can provide is pricing and a contract while typically lacking experience in a technical environment. They routinely rely on a second, third or even a fourth party to make sure that your environment is intact. We are not suggesting that this is a terrible model, but what we found has been very successful across all facets of a technical deployment at Macronet Services. We bring 20+ years of telecommunications experience leading large global solution architecture teams to essentially understand how these environments work. Considering all the negotiated designs that go into a contract; by utilizing important baseline information, we have enabled customers to use that legacy heritage that we offer. To us, it is very important to understand your design up front the first time versus going back to multiple calls, bringing in engineering resources because you cannot simply articulate something. Given these factors, a telecom consultant should have been an engineer at some point in their career.

• Project Management During Telco Services Installs: This project management activity does not need to replace any PMs that you have internally; it is simply to augment. In these types of environments, why augment project management? The reason is many PMs do not understand the acronyms that telecoms provide. Telecom project managers and engineers speak almost a different language and having a telecom consultant to be able to decipher is extremely beneficial. Also, the telecom consultant can provide some insight into areas that could speed up your install and ensure installation time plans will be met. All of our installs include some sort of project management to ensure that the contract and the environment roll out stays on track.
• Expense Management:  As mentioned previously in this article, expense management is extremely critical. This is one of the reasons why you want to ensure expense management is put into place at the onset of the installation. We have seen, on average, a 30% error rate across telecom billing. These can be due to missed discount codes, terms, and other things that fall off the first initial bill. Correcting these problems up front will save you not only dollars from your operational expenses, but headaches later. Many times, organizations do not catch the expense challenges that occur at the onset of that first bill and try to recover those fees later. It could be a year or two years later. Depending upon what is in your actual contract, you may only be able to recover certain items within the last several months. Ensuring that these bills are audited up front and audited by a telecom consultant is essential.
• Support Escalation: There are times when an organization has opened a ticket or may have an outage and is looking for additional gentle nudge to ensure that the ticket is completed. There is not a guarantee that a telecom consultant can move your ticket to resolution any faster than what you are already going through. However, it does help to leverage existing relationships that the telecom consultant may have internally with a particular carrier. If it is a Tier 1 ISP or a large CLEC, it is likely we will have some sort of relationship to add additional emphasis if you are in a break fix environment. If it is a small, regional mom and pop telco, most likely the line that you are in will be the line that you’ll continue to be in no matter who barks the loudest. We have been successful in trying to make sure that a customer success representative is supportive of your environment. Additionally, that you are supported equally based on the amount of spend that you potentially could have in your new wide area network. In this example we could use this as a leverage point where we could negotiate, ensuring that there is a designated resource to help you and get additional support should there be a break fix requirement.

Telecom Audit Challenges

Most companies do not understand that the carriers, especially traditional tier one ISP providers, are a combination of acquisitions and mergers over the last 10 to 20 years. Many of these organizations have not seamlessly integrated their tools and inventory systems to make their life and yours much easier. Have you ever received a bill from a company multiple times with different account numbers? The answer is probably yes, and the reason is that it may have a letterhead change. However, the inventory that it was built on may be from a company that was acquired or merged with the current organization. This can often confuse accounts payable teams because they feel that they submitted payment to provider A, and provider A has sent them multiple invoices. Now,

many of the carriers have started to migrate all their invoices into one bill with the various billing account numbers. However, this can still be confusing; especially when carriers change the actual account number midflight within a contract. They have simply looked to migrate their systems together and have brought some of the burden back onto customers. When you look at your bills today, it is very important that you take into consideration understanding all the intricacies. Areas such as the Universal Service Fund (USF), which is a government tax from which you cannot absolve yourself unless you are an actual service provider. The USF fund does apply to most of the carriers. However, some carriers do not apply it as you would think. One of the tactics that we have been able to utilize with clients is lowering the USF tax rate. This is done through a combination of evaluating where your services are to what the providers may have for USF tax relief.

How much does a Telecom Audit and Consultant Cost?

We have broken out what telecom consultant costs should result back to your organization. And quite honestly, if anyone tells you otherwise based on this general average, we believe that they are either overcharging you or undercharging you for their services. It is very important to understand every telecom consultant, based on their background, will charge a different price. Below is what Macron Net Services charges for telecom consulting and we feel that this is, quite honestly, where the industry should be. This is not to say that everyone charges this same amount and often we have encountered organizations that charge way too much while providing very little insight, and quite honestly have just milked the customer. That is not our approach. We are engineering first. Our goal is to design, deliver, and implement. This helps you govern your environment and then we move on and hopefully you have had an excellent experience and will refer us to another organization. That is how we continue our business.

How does Macronet’s outsourced telecom cost optimization work? One of the areas that we have perfected over the last 20 plus years is to not throw technology or people at a problem without fully understanding where the issue or issues lie. The first step in our process is really to listen and gather information. This can include contracts, bills, and other necessary documentation that the company has acquired over the last term. To come up with a baseline solution, we really need to look under the covers of what has been contracted and is actually in use today. The advantage that we bring to the table is not only our business acumen around telecom expenses, but we have also spent 20+ years designing and implementing various telecom services for Global 1000 companies to small startups. Our engineering first approach allows us to enable our business analytics approach to maximize reduction, while improving the functionality of your network. For example, if you were paying what we believe is 30 to 40% higher on Internet market rates for a service, and you are at 80% utilization, and we could potentially provide an alternative which lowers your current spend by 30% while doubling or tripling the amount of capacity that you have for that piece of the network. Not only do you get to take advantage of a lower OpEx, you will have a better user experience for the services rendered. This is a very simple sample of something that we encounter with many of our customers. However, when you multiply that across multiple services, you receive a service and savings that is undeniable. Now, what happens when you have a roll up of varied reductions? However, to achieve this, the teams need to implement these changes. Macronet Services has helped hundreds of organizations achieve these benefits while redesigning their networks with minimal pain.

If you need a free assessment to determine if a Telecom Consultant is needed in your business, Contact US!  We would love to discuss areas you have might have a need to reduce your Telecom Costs.