Telecom contracts: the bigger your SME grows, the less the law protects you

The C in ICT, the one for communication, is the most neglected side of technology spending in SMEs. It is also the only one governed by a precise Belgian legal framework, with a threshold very few business owners know about: beyond nine workers, most of the telecom law's protections cease to apply to your company. In other words, you lose the regulatory safety net at exactly the moment when your fleet, your lines and your invoices start to grow. And the counterpart advising you is most often accredited with the operators.

In an SME, telecom spending has one particularity: it is fragmented. A mobile fleet with one operator, the head office connection with another, a depot line inherited from an old contract, fixed telephony half migrated, a backup subscription taken out after an outage and never re-examined. Each line is small, none on its own justifies a meeting, and together they end up representing a significant amount that nobody steers. Meanwhile, that same infrastructure has become the mandatory gateway for the entire business: if the connection goes down, the hosted ERP goes with it, IP telephony is cut off, payment terminals stop. Telecom is no longer a commodity. It is the pipe on which everything else depends.

The nine-worker threshold, the line nobody knows

Belgian law on electronic communications protects subscribers, but not all of them in the same way, and that is where the essentials play out. The BIPT, the regulator, explains it clearly: to benefit from the termination rules applicable to consumers, a company or self-employed person must have no more than nine workers. The same threshold applies to obtaining the basic itemised bill, which must in particular state the duration of the contracts taken out and the absence of termination fees. Within the Easy Switch procedure, the BIPT further states that companies with an average of ten workers or more over the past financial year do not benefit from the cap on the termination indemnity. And after an automatic extension, a fixed-term contract may be terminated at any time, even immediately, by a consumer or a company with no more than nine workers, whereas other subscribers must observe a notice period of up to one month.

The consequence is counter-intuitive. An SME of twenty, fifty or a hundred and twenty people, the one with the most lines, the biggest invoice and the strongest dependence on its connection, is precisely the one negotiating without the safeguards designed for small subscribers. Its protection no longer comes from the law. It can only come from the contract it signed, and from the quality with which that contract was negotiated.

Three sources of savings nobody looks at

The first is the dormant line. A member of staff who has left, a depot that has closed, a terminal replaced: the subscription keeps running, because nobody holds formal responsibility for closing it. The second is the inherited option. Services taken out for an old need, an oversized data allowance, an intervention guarantee paid for a site that no longer needs it. The third is the tariff never realigned. The telecom market moves fast, today's price lists bear no resemblance to those of three years ago, and a contract that rolls over tacitly does not realign itself. To that add a detail that is not one: the maximum duration of a subscription is twenty-four months, but a micro or small enterprise may expressly agree to go beyond that at the time of signing. That clause exists, it is often signed without being read, and it commits you for longer than the law provided by default.

The intermediary and which hat they wear

Then comes the same question as for IT, and it is even sharper here. When an owner wants to compare offers, they turn either to their operator's sales representative or to a telecom broker. The first will never present a competitor's catalogue, which is logical. The second presents themselves as impartial, and the phrase they use of their own accord is telling: they are accredited with the operators. In brokerage, in telecom as in energy or insurance, the dominant model is payment by the vendor selected, in the form of commission. That does not invalidate the service rendered, which can be real and useful. But it creates a simple reality that must be named: when advice is funded by the party who sells, the option “change nothing this year and renegotiate your current contract” earns nothing for whoever would voice it. So it is rarely voiced.

The separation to install is not a question of trust in people, but of structure. Whoever writes your requirement, calculates your real volumes and reads your clauses should not depend financially on the vendor chosen. It is the only way to obtain advice whose conclusion may be to buy nothing at all.

Telecom, the weak link in your continuity

One angle remains that the pricing discussion always pushes aside: resilience. An SME that has migrated its management to the cloud has shifted its risk without realising it. Its data is better protected than before, but its business now depends entirely on a single pipe, often a single connection, sometimes a single modem, with a single operator. The questions to ask are not technical, they are matters for the board. How long does the company hold out without access? Is there a second path, for example a mobile backup that takes over automatically? What does the contract say about the guaranteed restoration time, and does that guarantee cover your actual business hours? An honest answer to those three questions costs less than half a day of downtime, and it often changes the trade-off: better a slightly more expensive line with a real restoration commitment than a cheap line with no recourse.

Governing both halves of ICT