Despite the benefits VoIP offers, such as low costs, high quality and flexibility, some users hesitate to make the switch because of a lack of emergency calling abilities. VoIP phones are not related to addresses and fixed lines, making it more difficult to locate someone calling 911 from a VoIP service; however, there are solutions. Utilizing E911 hosted solutions can ensure that emergency responders arrive at the right location, and some VoIP providers have begun to connect their systems to public phone networks to allow emergency calling using VoIP services.
In most countries, the capability to offer access to emergency services is not only a regulatory obligation, but also a "must-have" from a commercial standpoint. Many enterprises are only willing to migrate their telephone service to next-generation voice providers that can terminate calls to the local emergency service.
Voxbone, a provider of geographical, toll-free and iNum (News - Alert) telephone numbers, is enabling cloud communications providers to cost-effectively meet European regulatory and market requirements with its VoxOUT solution, an add-on to VoxDID, which allows customers to extend the international reach of their telephony network rapidly and with limited costs. VoxOUT enables providers of cloud communications, SIP trunking and other enterprise VoIP services to support emergency calling, offering instant access to local emergency services from multiple countries over one central interconnection.
The solution is the first wholesale service that supports telephone access in multiple European countries from a single IP-based interconnection. It 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.
“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 (News - Alert) CEO Rod Ullens, in a statement. “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.”
VoxBone’s private global VoIP network carried 2.8 billion minutes of voice traffic in 2011. At the core of VoxOUT, Voxbone maintains routing tables that map local addresses to local emergency service numbers. If an end-user of a Voxbone customer makes a call to the emergency service, Voxbone determines the location of the end-user in its address database and looks up the E.164 telephone number of the corresponding local emergency service. After the emergency number has been translated into a local telephone number, Voxbone delivers the call to the local PSTN, on which it is routed to its destination. The service works with any SIP-compatible service platform.
Examples of service provider customers for VoxOUT include cloud communications providers, hosted PBX (News - Alert) providers, global B2B telecommunication services providers, enterprise telephony network integrators and SIP trunking service providers.
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Edited by Allison Boccamazzo