Are land lines on the brink of extinction?

Workplaces looking to enter the 21^st century may be encouraged to chuck their telephone land lines in favour of a new business communications tool that gives you all of your old-school phone features while letting you work just about anywhere.

Rogers launched Rogers Unison this week, a business service the telecom giant expects will help small to medium sized businesses save as much as 40 per cent on their monthly phone bills.

But will cutting the cord on traditional telecom services mean the end of business desk phones as we know them?

“This is not the extinction of land lines; it’s the evolution of land lines,” says Charlie Wade, senior vice president of products and solutions at Rogers. “I think we’re shifting land lines and that technology onto the mobile. We aren’t going to see the complete removal of desk phones as there are folks in the office who still use them.”

Wade says small and medium sized businesses spend $25 to $50 per phone line per month but could realize annual savings of $300 to $600 per year with Unison.

The software product lets businesses connect with customers and employees no matter where they are thanks to a web-based portal and mobile devices. Rogers Unison includes features such as an automated answering system, the ability to route incoming calls from one staffer to the next ensuring clients aren’t on hold for too long and the capability to create multiple identities to ensure a local presence in multiple regions by adding and routing local numbers to their mobile device. A voicemail to email feature is also included. This automatically turns all voicemail messages into email messages.

“We certainly think our small business customers have been keeping their land lines because they need to keep the number because it’s on their website, it’s on their business card, it’s on the letterhead,” explains Wade. “Now they can do that but they can be way more agile, way more contactable by their customers because it’s not just ringing in the office, but potentially they’re not.”

The launch this week is Rogers first plan of attack in its quest for a piece of what it says is a $2 billion market, the company’s enterprise business unit president Nitin Kawale told the Globe and Mail. Next up with be larger corporations and the public sector.

Toronto telecom consultant Mark Goldberg believes products like Unison will prove to be a tremendous asset for certain workplaces and professions.

“Let says you’re a plumber and you can’t miss a call,” Goldberg says. “If someone needs a plumber they’re not going to leave a message. They’re going to call the next plumber on the list because they need to reach somebody because the pipe’s broken. So when a plumber is out on a call he doesn’t want to miss a call.”

Services such as Unison are the next step in the evolutionary progression of the telecom industry, says Goldberg, but Rogers will ultimately need to lead the charge by showing the world that it believes in it as well.

“Part of that is using capabilities themselves,” he says. “If it isn’t good enough to provide communications capability in your own business, then it’s a lot tougher to sell to somebody else. If you see a lot of wire line phones at Rogers you’ve got to be asking questions.”