TMCnet Feature

By the time you read this, Neutral Tandem (News - Alert) will be no more. As of February 7 at 8 AM ET, the company has renamed itself Inteliquent and now trades on NASDAQ under the new ticker symbol IQNT.

“A year and a half ago, we acquired Tinet,” said Surendra Saboo, president and chief operating officer of Inteliquent. “We had two strong brands in their particular areas, Tinet (News - Alert) in IP transit and Neutral Tandem in the voice space. Looking at the kinds of things we are actually providing to customers now, we felt neither of those brands fits well going into the future.”

Inteliquent, the company formerly known as Neutral Tandem, stands for eloquent solutions for the complex problems customers face.

“We're providing solutions to our customers, instead of products such as voice or IP,” Saboo explained. “We are now providing a lot more than those two services. We put in a lot of thought and work into this. We're clearly taking two strong brands that we had and to change that is no small task. We do feel Inteliquent reflects who we are and who we are going to be in the future.”

Inteliquent's portfolio includes traditional TDM switching, transit, termination, and origination voice services; the EtherCloud Layer 2 Ethernet service built on the Tinet MPLS backbone to provide global seamless Ethernet connectivity; CommonPoint optimized routing; and hosted services for voice and other applications.   While the company name is changing, individual services will continue to keep their existing names.

Other things that won't change are Neutral, er, Inteliquent's customer base, the amount of voice traffic moving across its network, and its global footprint. Inteliquent is a neutral exchange point for over 110 major wireless, CLEC and cable service providers and routes over 10 billion minutes of traffic each month. Its IPv6 and MPLS network has over 120 Ethernet POPs around the globe and the company is a top 5 global IP transit provider.

If you'd like to get an explanation directly from the company, you can go to Inteliquent's new website, complete with the obligatory video.

From a broader perspective, building an identity not associated with “Tandem” – definitely a legacy term – is a good idea. IP is the present and future for telephony services, be it wireless or wireline. There's also more than enough room under the “Inteliquent” name to add additional services without being bound to strict concepts of either voice or IP routing services.