Provider Solutions: Retail or SMB? CLECs & LECs Need Both

The VoIP provider market has been evolving over the last decade and has three very clear channels: retail/residential end users, business users, and peer-to-peer.

Residential

Companies like Vonage (News - Alert) have been in the forefront of the residential market for years. Their name is almost synonymous with residential VoIP service. They also try to target businesses, but their mainstay is residential.

Business Users

Ring Central and 8x8 (News - Alert) have been focusing on the hosted business market from 15-100 users. Competition in this market segment is increasing as this is where a majority of the business.

The large on-premises market has been the target of Cisco (News - Alert), Avaya, Nortel, and others.

Peer-to-Peer

Skype is the best known for their peer-to-peer technology. They are able to provide good quality based on their IPBC Codec. They make money when people try to dial to the PSTN.

Wanabes

Telcos that are starting up, individuals starting a provider operation, and companies that plan to start their own provider service will pick one of these VoIP channels. Once the channel has been chosen, then they can start looking for a company that can deliver technology to provide service to the channel selected.

Residential Solutions

Residential solutions seem to have grown from open source. We find that Asterisk (News - Alert) and FreeSWITCH are in this area. While not designed for residential, Asterisk has its limitations. FreeSWITCH, having been designed as a switch, fits this market very well, scales well and is fast.

Business Solutions

Those companies that are looking to provide business solutions can purchase the technology from the following: Broadsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems (News - Alert), Sonus Networks, MetaSwitch.

These are typically expensive solutions that lock you into their price structure well into the future. An alternate to the above is FreeSWITCH which provides a basic PBX (News - Alert) or an Asterisk implementation.

CLEC & LEC Needs

CLECs and LECs that have not migrated to VoIP find themselves in a difficult situation. Their customer base includes businesses and residential customers. How do they address both market segments when the available solutions tend to only address one market segment?

CLEC & LEC Solution

It’s clear that they can purchase equipment from different vendors to address their needs, but that may not be the best solution to minimize support costs. Can they use open source and do it themselves? A number of companies have tried this and have found it puts them into a different business. They become a technology developer instead of a service provider. This tendency is generally accentuated when the price quotes of the commercial solutions are received. There is a big difference between network engineers and development engineers. Many companies do not recognize this and have paid the price when the internally developed solution does not work or because it continues to take costly development time by the developing engineer who is the only one that knows how the product was developed. They may have save a few dollars in the short run, but paid the price in the long run.

Another Solution

Ring Carrier now offers a product that provides a solution to both market segments equally well. Based on open source, Ring Carrier can provide very cost-effective full featured iPBX solution and a very scalable residential solution that is has a provider interface for both.

The provider interface allows the administrator to create a new iPBX for a business in a matter of seconds. Each business server can support more than 50 iPBXs on each server reducing the LEC and CLEC CAPEX significantly. The same can be done for a new residential server. The residential solution can scale to 100s of thousands of users easily. The interface allows the administrator to easily manage colocation facilities in multiple locations as well as the redundant facilities.

The iPBX enterprise manager has their own interface as well as the iPBX end user. This holds true for the residential solution. The provider will manage the creation of the end user account and the residential user has their own interface.

There is an application interface available that allows the creation of the iPBX and the residential user process to be automated.

Summary

Ring Carrier provides a package that delivers the technology to the business and residential market with the features that the CLEC and LEC customers have been looking for at a price that does not break the bank. IT

Don Witt is president of cyLogistics (News - Alert) (www.cylogistics.com).

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