Resources

Guides, Tools & Reference

Practical resources for IT managers, operations leaders, and business owners navigating telecom decisions — written by people who negotiate these contracts every day.

Downloadable Guides

Free PDF guides on technology trends, infrastructure decisions, and cybersecurity — ready to share with your team.

Guides

21 articles

Payment Processing Guides

Advisory resources on merchant services, processing programs, and hardware — written for business owners, not payment engineers.

Telecom Audit Checklist

Run through this before your next contract renewal or carrier RFP. Most businesses find at least one material issue in each section.

Audit your current spend

  • List all active services and monthly costs
  • Identify contract end dates for each service
  • Flag services not actively used in the past 90 days
  • Check for auto-renewal clauses and notice windows

Benchmark against market pricing

  • Request quotes from at least 3 competing carriers
  • Compare equivalent speeds and SLA tiers
  • Account for installation costs and waiver eligibility
  • Factor in contract length vs. total cost of ownership

Review your SLA coverage

  • Confirm uptime guarantee (target 99.99% for critical sites)
  • Check MTTR commitment (target 4 hours or less)
  • Read the remedy section — credits should be meaningful
  • Verify exclusions don't swallow the guarantee

Evaluate your voice infrastructure

  • Identify how many lines are actively used vs. provisioned
  • Calculate per-minute costs for long distance and international
  • Assess remote work compatibility of current phone system
  • Compare UCaaS total cost vs. current PBX maintenance

Plan for redundancy

  • Every critical site should have a backup circuit
  • Primary and backup should use different physical infrastructure
  • Test failover at least once per quarter
  • Confirm backup covers VoIP and critical cloud apps

Calculate your real downtime cost

  • Estimate revenue at risk per hour of outage
  • Count employees who cannot work without internet
  • Add IT incident response and recovery time
  • Use this number to justify redundancy investment

Don't want to run this audit yourself? Fibi does it as part of our free advisory process — we review your current contracts, benchmark against market pricing, and present you with a side-by-side comparison across carriers. Start a free review →

Glossary

Plain-language definitions across telecom, networking, UCaaS, and payment processing — from DIA and SD-WAN to interchange-plus and PCI DSS.

DIATelecom

Dedicated Internet Access — private, unshared fiber with guaranteed symmetric bandwidth and a formal SLA.

SD-WANTelecom

Software-Defined WAN — routes enterprise traffic across multiple connections, replacing MPLS at lower cost.

Interchange-PlusPayment

Transparent pricing model: actual interchange cost passed through plus a fixed processor markup.

PCI DSSPayment

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard — compliance requirements for businesses that accept cards.

SLATelecom

Service Level Agreement — contractual uptime, latency, and repair-time commitments from your carrier.

Cash DiscountPayment

Listed price = cash price. Card customers pay a disclosed service fee at checkout.

View Full Glossary (50+ terms)

Get new guides by email

We publish practical telecom guides monthly — no marketing, no spam.