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US LEC VoIP ProductsUS LEC is rolling out new products in the VoIP space Tuesday June 21, 2005. By RICH TEHRANI TMCnet Technology Analysis Columnist I had a great conversation recently with a CLEC named US LEC. Recently I was speaking at a conference and when I was done, a company representative in the audience started to tell me about all the activity at the company and how US LEC was going to be rolling out a whole slew of new products in the VoIP space. I subsequently spoke with Rob Malnati, director of product and business development for US LEC and he told me how he had read the recent CLEC Survival Guide in Internet Telephony Magazine and he agrees that CLECs need to diversify and look for new areas to generate revenue from. With that, the North Carolina based organization told me more about their business as a $375 million a year CLEC focusing a number of vertical markets such as medical, hospitality, automotive and real estate. The company is pretty large at over 1,000 employees and a footprint in 15 states from Miami to NYC Rob proudly told me. They are selling more and more IP-based products and there current products include frame relay, Internet, dedicated servers and hosting. Their first solution in the VoIP space was Dynamic T, allowing Internet and voice across a private IP line over a T1. There is also a SIP variant of this product allowing termination into a SIP based PBX. Today, they announced Big Voice, a service that uses compression to allow for more than 30 calls on a T1 line. Just as with the products above, you are sharing a line for voice and data so that at night for example, you can take advantage of the capacity to do offsite backups – perhaps to the company’s servers. I am told the medical industry has archival needs that make great sense for this sort of service. When you stop and think about all the data theft of backup tapes lately, it is reassuring to know you can backup over a data line and have the file available with just a few mouse clicks if needed. Rob tells me the files are compressed and encrypted when being sent in either direction. There are more services coming soon, such as the ability to have workers at home be billed on a corporate telephone number and at corporate rates. If you are working from home, you enter the number you want to call into a web browser and a call is initiated from the company to you and the party to be called. The beauty of this system is that there is no mess of dealing with expense reports, the called party gets the proper caller-ID information and there is ownership of the customer by the corporation, who only gives out the corporate number. Currently when many companies lose an employee that works out of their home, business contacts will still call that employee at home, unaware that they are no longer affiliated with the organization. This is very useful service from that perspective. The company seems very customer focused which is a far cry from traditional ILEC sales teams that don’t really care about smaller customers. US LEC’s stock chart ( http://www.tmcnet.com/bizwatch/charting.htm?osymb=clec&siteid=78D98541-6213- 495F-AB48-83A982D80BA6&sid=103613&symb=clec&time=3yr&go=Draw+Cha rt ) is not fantastic, so I can’t say the company is on fire but it seems that they are expanding into areas that customers need help in, such as back-ups and more flexible VoIP services. The work at home solution is something that all companies with employees working at home can benefit from. If they can promote these products successfully, they may have a very bright future. ----- Rich Tehrani is President and Editor-in-Chief at TMC. He is Technology Analysis columnist for TMCnet. For more articles by Rich Tehrani, please visit: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100026&nm=Rich%20T ehrani To read Rich Tehrani's VoIP Blog, please visit: http://voip-blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/ |