Skyway Sweet UC: the Smart Choice over Shaw SmartVoice
The Skyway Sweet UC DifferenceSkyway Sweet UC beats Shaw’s SmartVoice on included features, support, voice quality and security. At an average of $10-15 less per user per month the smart choice is Sweet UC.
SmartVoice is a phone and unified communications solution using the Broadsoft hosted platform and delivered by Shaw Communications over their cable and fibre networks. Skyway’s Sweet UC, powered by Kandy in partnership with Ribbon Communications, is a feature rich cloud-based PBX, unified communications and collaboration solution delivered by Skyway over DSL and fibre and using Skyway private direct links to reach Ribbon and the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). These secure connections prevent Denial of Service attacks and bypass the Public Internet to avoid latency, jitter and packet loss.
While Shaw and Skyway provide both the service and the delivery network, the Skyway DSL network is an inherently much better solution for voice and UC traffic. DSL uses a dedicated, point-to-point connection to our network hub whereas Shaw cable is a shared network subject to traffic congestion at peak usage times, creating jitter, packet loss and other factors affecting voice quality. Traffic congestion in a local loop is a situation that can take months to resolve. Shaw also can’t offer the same assurances of VoIP packet privacy provided by Skyway’s dedicated network, as voice traffic on a shared cable network is susceptible to sniffing, fraud and other forms of interception.
Skyway provides several different internet access services. This means a Skyway customer has the option and benefit of securing two services, using policy routing to optimize traffic on each, and of failing over from one service to another (for example, from DSL to cable or LTE) if one service fails. Inbound and outbound failover ensures business continuity, which is something Shaw cannot match.
Shaw is headquartered in Calgary and is one of the largest telecommunications companies in Canada. They serve both business and residential markets and on top of high speed internet and UC services, they have diverse interests in TV production, radio and television broadcasting, satellite communications and logistics tracking. Support for Smartchoice is provided by a user-prompted phone queue, with most support issues handled by machine. In contrast, Skyway West offers Internet solutions exclusively to the business market, and Skyway Sweet UC support is provided by a local team based in the Lower Mainland in BC. With Skyway West you will interact with a real person until your problem is solved even if that resolution requires a site visit. Both companies provide on-site training.
Advertised pricing plans indicate that Sweet UC is priced about $10-15 less per month per user than Shaw SmartVoice, which starts at $39.95 per user for basic phone service ($34.95 on a 3-yr term) and $49.95 per user with the addition of collaborative UC features (44.95 on a 3-yr term). Skyway’s Sweet UC basic phone service is $25/user on a 3-yr term ($30 on 1 year) and our UC plan costs only $30/user ($35 on a 1 year term). Skyway Sweet UC offers a flexible and scalable, ‘pay-as-you-go’ pricing model that lets organizations pay for what they use and add or remove services when needed.
Sweet UC v Shaw SmartVoice Pricing
| Price per User per Month | Sweet UC Premium Voice | Shaw SmartVoice | Sweet UC Office | Shaw SmartVoice Collaborative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One Year Term | $30 | $39.95 | $35 | $49.95 |
| Three Year Term | $25 | $34.95 | $30 | $44.95 |
Even with substantially lower prices, Sweet UC easily competes with Shaw on a feature-by-feature basis, and outclasses SmartVoice on a number of basic features. For example, “Do Not Disturb” is available in our basic, Premium Voice package, but not at all in Shaw’s equivalent plan. Our multi-conferencing allows for ten users, while Shaw’s only allows for three.
As well as turn-key cloud UC services such as Cloud PBX, Mobility and Cloud Collaboration, Sweet UCKandy has made it easy for developers to embed voice, video and all things RTC (real time communications) within applications, in a manner that is robust and highly scalable. Already, advanced solutions allow you to easily leverage HTML5 and WebRTC to integrate with Salesforce, Outlook, Microsoft Dynamic and Office, Google Apps, Skype for Business (Lync), as well as IBM Connections and Sametime. Kandy-powered Sweet UC also offers pre-built, pre-packaged “Kandy Wrappers” to extend UC features to your existing apps or websites. Shaw SmartVoice offers no “off-the-shelf” integrations, and will not consider any software integrations for an SMB with less than 100 paying users.
Our partner Ribbon has been registered to the International Quality Standards of ISO 9001 and TL 9000 since 2001, and their global reputation for quality and reliability was the number one reason Skyway chose them as its voice partner. Ribbon promises and delivers 99.999999% (eight 9s) uptime for their network, beating the “carrier-grade” standard by a factor of 1,000.
Ribbon, recognized in 2015 on CNBC’s Top 50 Disruptor list, is a global leader in developing the future of contextual, real-time communications, whether by phone, email, video, text or audio. The partnership with Ribbon gives Skyway customers affordable access to a future-proof UC solution which extends the reach of the desktop phone to computers, smartphones and tablets, allowing users to work and collaborate anywhere, on any device.