IP Communications Featured Articles

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems enables users to make and receive telephony calls over a broadband Internet connection instead of over a traditional phone line. It offers significant benefits compared to legacy phone systems, including cost savings, portability, more ways to stay connected, easy access and rich media service.

Lightyear Network Solutions (News - Alert), Inc., a provider of data, voice and wireless telecommunication solutions to tens of thousands of business and residential customers across the U.S., has launched its new VoIP Calling Platform, offering a number of benefits for Lightyear’s popular IP telephony product such as increased functionality and flexibility.

The platform provides robust controls and features that were not available with the previous proprietary softswitch the company utilized under a licensing agreement.

Lightyear Hosted VoIP for Business has configurations for managers, executives, assistants, front-line employees, conference rooms, lobbies and more.  These packages include all the business-class telephony features including auto attendant, voice mail and unified messaging, user dashboard, simultaneous ring, selective call forwarding and hunt groups.  

Other solutions offered are data solutions, which include dynamic circuits, dedicated Internet access, domestic Ethernet private line and MPLS; as well as voice solutions like SIP trunking, conferencing services, Lightyear XSTREAM VoIP and long distance services, and wireless services.

The company developed its own new platform using open source methodology because of its low cost and high uptime without the need for expensive licenses and long waiting times for modifications. Open source developers are constantly updating the base application and adding new features, which Lightyear can easily incorporate into its platform.

Lightyear's new softswitch also provides a number of customer benefits, including cleaner, faster call quality, enhanced feature set not available from traditional offerings, improved business continuity options over legacy systems, additional capacity for simultaneous calls, cost-competitive pricing for on-network calls and reduced governmental fees compared with traditional phone service.

"We are excited and proud to commercially deploy our new VoIP platform," said Stephen M. Lochmueller, Lightyear's chief executive officer, in a statement. "Our IT team has worked diligently on this project for a number of months, and the platform performed exceptionally well in beta testing. This new VoIP architecture will allow Lightyear to adapt to its customer needs very quickly to set us apart from our competitors."