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March 18, 2008
Speakeasy Goes Off Net with Broadband Services
By Gary Kim, Contributing Editor
Speakeasy ( News - Alert), which provides broadband access and business voice services nationally, now has unbundled its VoIP  services from its broadband services, and now permits customers to subscribe to its VoIP services on a standalone basis nationwide.
No, Speakeasy is not changing its business strategy. It still focuses on smaller businesses who need basic voice and data. But it has discovered the same issue larger providers experience when selling services to larger enterprises: there are headquarters sites and then other locations to support, some of them of the "one user" sort.
To get a contract, a Tier One carrier might have to supply services in multiple cities, nations or continents, to large sites, mid-sized locations and small homes and remote workers. Typically, no single carrier can support all the use cases "on network." That's why carriers routinely buy capacity and services from other carriers to service the "off network" locations and users.
By unbundling business VoIP from its broadband service offering, Speakeasy can better serve multi-location smaller businesses (Speakeasy is owned by electronics retailer Best Buy, which operates the "Best Buy for Business" unit).
The downside is that Speakeasy will have to provide those voice services over unmanaged access facilities, which always presents some risk of quality degradation.
Still, the move better matches voice services to the needs of multi-location customers, who almost by definition more likely to buy virtual private networks and other "networks" rather than simple local Internet access service.
The move is important because ability to support multi-location customers is emerging as a market differentiator. The other issue is more tactical: some customers who might like to buy Speakeasy broadband services have to wait until their current contracts run to term.
By offering access to voice services on an "over the top" basis, Speakeasy gains the ability to sell services now, and begin building a relationship, even before it is in contention to replace an existing broadband supplier.
Don’t forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users. Today’s featured white paper is Convergence in Telecommunication, brought to you by Comarch (News - Alert).
Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page. Internet Protocol (IP) | X | | IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
Voice over IP (VoIP) | X | | A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
(source: http://hosted-communications.tmcnet.com/topics/broadband-comm/articles/23142-speakeasy-goes-off-net-with-broadband-services.htm)
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