We were working with GTT which, prior to being GTT, was Transbeam. We decided to switch because we had three outages within my first ten months on the job, and I just didn't want that. 

In addition, I came in with a plan, from the moment that I walked in, to cut the budget within three years by a minimum of 15 percent and by a max of 30 percent. I identified four or five different things that we had to work with on the operational side of the budget, including reviewing our existing contracts for hardware, software, and our utility. ISP voice became part and parcel of that. I renewed and renegotiated about 16 or 17 contracts, and it's helped to reduce the budget. RCN is in the top-three in terms of saving us money.

Also, I had a relationship with the salesperson. He had worked for another company, Time Warner. He had solicited our business but, at the time, we couldn't do it. When he moved over to RCN he said, "Bracey, let's talk. This may be a better solution." We looked at and evaluated the numbers over a two or three-month process. Then they came back with a proposal. We didn't even counter, we just said, "Let's sign it, let's do it." Six or seven months later we were implementing.

We had XO Communications and it was a legacy phone system. The costs were going up and RCN came in at a very competitive price, especially for the bandwidth they were willing to give us. They came in with 20 megs or 50 and they upgraded our regular internet and co-opted that into the phone deal.

They agreed to double the speed of our regular internet for no extra cost, which was very nice of them. The fact that they are our ISP as well as our voice provider is nice. If anything goes wrong, it's one company you have to deal with. It's not like, "Hey, the phone system's not working. Is it our internet provider, is it our phone service provider?" It's all the same.

Before, we were using a Broadview's service. They have a service called Office Suite. Initially, I was happy with their service, but their customer service started to deteriorate. A few situations happened where the response from their customer service wasn't satisfactory. 

Because we were using RCN's ISP for our internet, when our contract expired with Broadview, we were able to negotiate better pricing with RCN. And since they offered voice over IP we wanted to centralize our services, the internet and the VoIP, with one provider to have one vendor supporting us on both. And we were able to reduce our costs with a bundled service.

We used a previous solution. Cost and additional features are why we switched. We felt we were getting increased value.

We used two previous services. Way back in the day, when we were copper-line based, we were using Norstar. From there, we upgraded to Verizon and we went on-premise with a PPX system. What caused us to move off of that was that we had an outage with Verizon and that outage lasted us about a week, with no phones. That was very stressful, so we decided to end the contract with Verizon after they got us up and running. RCN, coincidentally, knocked on our door the following month and we said, "Come on in, let's talk about this SIP stuff." It was a big game-changer for us because there was something new. We weren't very comfortable with the cloud-based system, we didn't know how reliable it was going to be. We're happy we made the decision to go with them though.

Our other solution had outsourcing of customer service, it had bad phone quality, it had connectivity issues. It was just not a good product.

We had a very old phone system and we were looking to upgrade. The phone system that we had just wouldn't be able to handle the technology. We were looking for certain features.