Tag: voxbone

  • Voxbone Launches VoIP Emergency-Calling Service in Europe

    VoIP telephony service providers are struggling to meet European regulatory requirements and market demand for access to emergency-calling services. Inability to fulfill these needs is deterring many enterprises from migrating to VoIP-based telecommunications and is necessitating costly, complex arrangements for those that make the move.

    Voxbone today launched an easily-set-up,cost-effective solution: VoxOUT, which enables providers of cloud communications, SIP trunking and other enterprise VolP services to support emergency calling.

    Available initially in seven countries – the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Denmark – VoxOUT is claimed to be the first wholesale service that supports telephone access to emergency services in multiple European countries from a single IP-based interconnection. As a result, VoxOUT helps customers avoid the cost and complexity of alternatives for providing emergency-calling services in Europe, which require interconnecting with a local telco in each country or managing a local VoIP-to-PSTN gateway at every customer location.

    When a Voxbone customer’s subscriber calls an emergency number, Voxbone connects the call via the PSTN to the closest emergency service center. According to Voxbone, this process is completed in seconds and works with any SIP-compatible service platform.

    VoxOUT is available as an add-on to Voxbone’s VoxDID service, which offers global service providers local geographical telephone numbers and call capacity from more than 4,000 cities in 50-plus countries. VoxOUT is priced at a flat rate.

    “Our new VoxOUT service gives VoIP providers a competitive advantage when targeting European and multinational enterprises by helping them overcome one of the biggest barriers to migrating to VoIP,” said Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens.

    “While wholesale access to emergency services is widely available in North America, this is not common in other countries. This complicates things for U.S.-based cloud communication providers wanting to expand their services internationally. Combined with powerful IP-based communications applications and traditional voice-termination services for local calls to regular phone numbers, VoxOUT enables cloud providers to offer communications services that are superior to old-style telephony at all levels.”

    The company also informed that later this year, itwill make VoxOUT available in additional European countries, "followed by other major markets based on customer needs."

  • Sonetel to Give All Customers iNum Numbers From Voxbone

    Voxbone announced today that Sonetel, a Swedish VoIP provider with users in more than 200 countries, has begun giving all of its subscribers free iNum numbers from Voxbone. The agreement to provide iNums expands Sonetel's relationship with Voxbone, which has provided the certified reseller more than 17,000 geographical phone numbers since 2010.

    iNums are global phone numbers that Voxbone launched in 2008 to support IP communications. Using the international number range of +883 5100 assigned to Voxbone, iNums enable a customer to establish a local presence in new locations with a single, portable number. By providing every customer an iNum, Sonetel will extend the subscriber's range of free calling to include communications with all other iNum users, anywhere in the world.

    Sonetel offers a free hosted PBX solution that is particularly popular with small and medium businesses (SMBs) in price-sensitive regions, such as Africa and Asia. The company then upsells those customers on call termination and Voxbone-provided premium origination services. Together, Sonetel and Voxbone help business owners cost-effectively add local phone numbers, as well as launch virtual offices in any country where they see a market opportunity.

    Sonetel has begun providing iNums to its more than 40,000 existing users and will assign them to the 200 to 300 customers that sign up for service each day. In the process, Sonetel is helping enhance the value of iNums by expanding the number of businesses and other organizations worldwide that can be reached for free via iNums.

    iNums are distributed and routed by a growing list of service providers. Where not routed by a local provider, iNums also can be reached by the iNum initiative's local access numbers in 45 countries.

    "Sonetel's decision to provide free iNums to all of its customers is the latest example of increasing adoption of these flexible, global numbers that support IP communications features," said Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens. "The addition of iNums to Sonetel's innovative freemium PBX solution will enable a business to create a professional, global presence quickly and cost-effectively."

    "The iNum concept is ideally suited to the needs of our SMB customers and a natural complement to our existing offerings," said Sonetel CEO Henrik Thomé. "Providing free iNums will add value to our solution, making it easier for our customers to drive global growth."

  • Voxbone, Jajah Create Service That Localizes International Calling

    Voxbone has collaborated with Jajah to develop a value-added telecommunications service, which is said to make international calling "simple and affordable." The International Favorites service, which Jajah provides for mobile customers of O2 in the United Kingdom, offers a subscriber a virtual overseas number so the users can call at local rates.

    As part of the new service, Voxbone supplies an international “Call Me” number that directly reaches a customer’s mobile phone.

    The customer adds this second phone number from a country of choice to an existing mobile subscription. Calls to the number are dialed, delivered and billed like local PSTN calls. These calls are transmitted through Voxbone’s IP network to the O2 user’s mobile phone. The subscriber doesn’t need a special phone or application.

    The virtual number complements the subscriber’s U.K. mobile number, enabling two phone numbers to be mapped to the same device. The service works with most O2 phones.

    In addition, Voxbone is supplying numbers for another feature of International Favorites: provision of three local outbound numbers per subscriber that the customer may use to reach selected international landline and mobile numbers. A flat fee of £10 per month covers 3,000 minutes (50 hours) of calls to these numbers.

    “We are enthused about this opportunity to help a global telecom leader use our phone numbers and global VoIP backbone to create value for its customers and its business,” said Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens. “International Favorites enables customers to keep in closer touch with friends and loved ones in other countries, while it benefits operators by promoting customer loyalty and international calling.”

    “A new kind of geography is being formed that is about local presence and global relationships superseding distance or national borders,” said Trevor Healy, Chief Innovation Officer for Telefónica Europe. “International Favorites gives us a tremendous opportunity to innovate, reflect our users’ needs and open new revenue streams.”

  • MWC 2010: Interview with Rodrigue Ullens, CEO of Voxbone

    In a cozy booth at Mobile World Congress we found Rod Ullens, Co-founder and CEO of Voxbone, a VoIP carrier providing a centralized access to local phone numbers and toll-free numbers around the world.

    Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, they run a VoIP backbone distributed around multiple POP’s with three aggregation superPOP’s in Belgium, New York and Hong Kong.

    The company provides local and toll-free numbers from 48 countries and more than 4,000 cities to carriers, ITSPs and call-centers worldwide. Calls are collected locally and forwarded over IP to the customer’s equipment. Ordering, provisioning and configuration are done in realtime using a web-portal or a free API. Local number portability is supported in 15 countries.

    Watch the interview with Rod to find out what are the competitive advantages of Voxbone’s innovative VoIP solutions.

  • Voxbone: Revenue Rises 60 Percent, Network Traffic More Than Doubles in 2009

    Despite one of the worst global economic recessions in decades, Voxbone, a provider of IP network services, "saw another year of substantial growth in revenue, network traffic and new customers in 200", the company informed today.

    According to Voxbone, 2009 revenue was up 60 percent over the prior year, and minutes of use for inbound traffic grew 110 percent to 1.5 billion. In addition, Voxbone attracted more than 150 new customers to its base of service providers, multinational corporations, call center operators, conference call providers and others in the IP industry.

    Voxbone provides these customers with direct-inward-dial (DID) and iNum numbers for local presence in foreign markets while enabling them to deploy new advanced services via backbone dedicated to voice-origination services.

    Demand from conferencing providers, mobile VoIP providers, Web and telephony integrations, and enterprise customers accounted for much of Voxbone’s 2009 growth.

    Businesses’ global expansion, transition from the PSTN to IP, and deployment of high-definition voice and video services helped drive growth for the company.

    Voxbone reported it has assigned 18 million iNum numbers – global phone numbers with the “area code for Earth” – since introducing the service in November 2008.

    The company plans to make SMS services available through iNum and increase interoperability with mobile operators in 2010.

    Rod Ullens, Voxbone CEO, said, “What makes us different, and one of the main reasons for our success, is that Voxbone has been built from the beginning with an unusual mix of software expertise, a passion for open-source, deep understanding of telecom infrastructure and widespread global presence; we’re now in 49 countries.”

  • Interview with Rod Ullens, CEO and co-founder of Voxbone

    In a nutshell Voxbone provides services for telephone numbers also called DID numbers. The provision of these numbers to communication service providers exists so any type of company can be a VoIP company, it could be a call conferencing company, or it can be a call center.

    There are a lot of businesses, a lot of services that in fact use telephone numbers because when you have a service which is Internet based, and you offer telephone service using IP telephony for example, of course customers want access to those numbers. So you have the choice of either being a licensed operator to provide these numbers or you outsource to get the numbers form someone else.

    “We realized a couple of years ago that as more and more companies were launching services internationally, a lot of companies are global because the Internet is global and in such a situation a lot of companies needed phone numbers not just from the US but also from a lot of different countries so they could operate from day one in as many countries as possible” said Rod Ullens, CEO and co-founder of Voxbone, specifically when questioned on their recent move into Hong Kong.

    The decision was then made for Voxbone to launch a company that would focus on obtaining telephone numbers from as many countries as possible and to provide these in wholesale to anyone who needs it for their own services.

    In June of this year Voxbone started offering services without the need for 3G or wifi. This shift was innovative to say the least and became a focal point for the company. There are lots of mobile VoIP solutions out there and some of them are a software that you install on your mobile device. Let’s say you have a smartphone, you could download an application, it can be something like Nimbuzz or Truephone or some application that allows you to place calls international calls over wi-fi. When you make an international call this application detects that there is a wi-fi available and forwards the call over the wi-fi connection over the internet instead of routing the call over the traditional telephone network.

    Rod notes that this plan works today, but the problem with such a solution is that you don’t have wi-fi everywhere. This ties you down to specifically be in a wi-fi hot spot which makes the solution not as feasible or not as practical if you want to use it anywhere you are. The solution stands to the benefit of providers who offer mobile VoIP like Voxbone, where you don’t actually see that when you use the service you’re not using wifi or some 3G network, but rather a local number instead of an international number. This local call is made using a local DID number and then the call arrives to Voxbone and then Voxbone then forwards the call over the Internet to the customer.

    Rod Ullens gives the following example. “Suppose you are using a mobile phone application in the US and you want to make a phone call to someone in London, in the UK, your application will detect that it is an international call, it will detect that there is no wi-fi where you are, and instead of dialing a +44 number which is an international number, it will dial a local New York number, for example, if you are in New York. And then of course you will not have to pay the international call, but you will only pay a local call. The call will then be forwarded over the internet to the UK for a rate that is much lower than what you would have paid if you had made this international call from the beginning. So thats the idea, to benefit from mobile voice but without the 3G or wi-fi coverage.”


    Critics might claim that quality is lost in the process, but Rod insists that quality is not sacrificed for convenience. The reason? Your call goes out from your phone just as if you made a direct international call which will be “bounced” off Voxbone and sent to its destination intact and without loss. Basically the idea is to use the Internet as the shortest way possible and to forward the call internationally over a private backbone.

    Recently Voxbone was a part of the ClueCon conference, where they had an amazing presentation on scalability, which, in today’s technology climate, is a very hot topic. The Voxbone R&D Manager spoke about what Voxbone did to build a completely redundant and scalable network. The presentation stems from the fact that there is an impression that the carriers out there are sometimes afraid to use open source components in their Internet work.

    We believe with the right experience and the right people in the company, its [open source] actually a very efficient and very scalable solution that you can deploy for your network. So we wanted to show with a real case, which is our own network that having open source components in your network is actually something that can be very flexible and very affordable” Rod commented in response to the business world’s fears..

    Voxbone transports a lot of voice minutes, very reliably, and they could not do what they have done today without open source. When they launched their service it was decided from the very beginning that Voxbone wanted something very automated where the customers can select to reach continents. The call is forwarded, the customer can do lots of configurations themselves; it was not possible to do that with standard equipment when we launched our service.

    When asked what types of companies should consider services like those offered by Voxbone, Rod had this to say, “Ours is very specific to voice but in a general way I think reliability is something indeed that every company should consider but there are ways to make it very easy. As a service provider what we’ve tried to do is have a network that is very redundant because thats our job, but as a user of our services if you are for example, a call center, you might not have the expertise to build all thats required to share numbers between continents, and that’s where we step in to help

    Reliability and assurance is what Voxbone offers those that use their services. By ensuring up time, and redundancy, any company from the big to the small can benefit from using Voxbone, especially if a lot of work is done in various countries, which as stated before, is becoming more and more common.

    If you look at what Amazon is doing with its cloud-based solutions and so on, they are managing all the redundancy and all the complexity around it because its their job, but then the users using their service don’t have to worry about that anymore. Thats the same kind of strategy Voxbone has tried to put into place. We don’t sell our service to consumers so we don’t have to worry about all the marketing and all the customer care and so on but we do worry about the reliability and scalability at the corporate level.

    In terms of the industry keeping ahead of the game and providing services as new trends emerge, Rod stated that companies too often try to innovate before they even know what the client wants. This works against companies, and Voxbone, while innovative, keeps in close communication with their clients in order to ensure that growth is with the client, not leaps and bounds ahead of them. So their only worry is to have as many innovation tools that they can provide to the customers. Essentially, all going back to the ease of use and ease of creation within the open source platform.

    Voxbone has a busy 2009 schedule, with presentations at both the Las Vegas PrePaid Solutions Expo, and a September IT Expo.