Those in commercial office leases

[Brougham]

a few questions:

1.. do you have your own Synergy accts, or does the landlord/owner bill you the electricity costs themselves?

2. do i need to pay the stupidly high "business" phone plans, or can i get a home phone line connected? it's just for faxes and occasional voice calls, as well as ADSL. why pay $15-20 per month more for something i need but rarely use?

3. anyone recommend a good office contents insurer?

[shmoo]

1. Yes, you do your own accounts for power.

2. Ditch the phone all together and get naked DSL and use voip. Fax works on iinet voip these days too. Multi-line voip setups are possible if you need to. You get the one voip account with the naked dsl and then I think extra ones are $9 per month.

Otherwise, yes Telstra will put you onto a business plan.

3. I think ours is with Alianz. No idea if they're good or not. Sorry.

[Brougham]

hmmm, problem is i'm with westnet for internets and have all my dns, MX etc with them, plus static ip running the exchange box.

don't really want to have to shift to iinet.
even thou westnet is owned by iinet, i bet i can't do it in-house.
worth a phonecall i guess.

[shmoo]

you can get naked through westnet now.

[chew]

1. I would have thought it would depend on how the office is divided up and how many meters there are. i.e. one floor level of a building may have three individual tenants yet only one meter per floor. This then comes down to negotiation and lease agreements.

[Brougham]

you can get naked through westnet now.

nah, it's still iinet. they handle the signup, but accts is by iinet.
just rang them to get the details.
can easily get naked business grade DSL & VOIP thru iinet.
westnet continue holding my DNS records and backup MX relay, just updating them to new static IP thru iinet. all happy and sweet.

[xphread]

I am in exactly the same boat as Shmoo