The Life and Times of Seattle’s Small Business Systems Consultant. Articles and advice on small business phone systems, phone and internet services, VoIP, and all things technology related.
Selkowitz Technology | Seattle’s small business network and telecom consultant
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Many mainstream products are going green - cars, computers, cleaning products, etc. But finding an environmentally friendly phone system is a big tougher. When considering the greenness of electronics you have to consider the manufacturing process, levels of toxic materials in the product, energy consumption, lifespan, and recyclability at the end of life.
At the time I haven’t seen a phone system manufacturer tout the greenness of their solutions, but some are closer than others. Talkswitch is certainly quite far along on matters of reduced toxic materials and power consumption. Talkswitch systems are ROHS compliant, a standard for restricting the use of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, and harmful flame retardants. Our testing of a Talkswitch phone system using a Kill-A-Watt tester found it uses 7 - 15 watts depending on load - a remarkably small amount of power when compared to the 45-85 watts an Avaya Partner ACS consumes.
Perhaps the greenest thing a phone system can do is support telecommuting - allowing staff to work from home instead of driving into the office. Talkswitch does a great job at this and considering the equipment only costs $300-500 extra there’s a great return on investment given $4/gallon gas.
We’ve also found the Talkswitch to be remarkably reliable and they offer a great extended warranty option and out of warranty repair program - ensuring your system stays in use and out of the landfill. I hope we’ll see more emphasis on greenness with future phone systems, but right now Talkswitch is the best we’ve seen.
The Author: Kevin Selkowitz
About: Kevin Selkowitz is the founder and lead consultant for Selkowitz Technology, a Seattle-area small business systems consulting company. We focus on the four major technology needs of small businesses - phone systems, phone and internet service, servers/network infrastructure, and business applications.
This entry was posted by Kevin Selkowitz, on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Phone Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response on the right, or trackback from your own site.
