Being the little fish in a big pond is a good thing for Voice Carrier (News - Alert), a relatively new entrant in the Voice over IP industry.

In San Jose recently, TMC CEO Rich Tehrani interviewed Gary Johnson, president and CEO of Voice Carrier, which provides VoIP systems to small- and medium-sized businesses. Johnson explained where Voice Carrier fits in to the industry and how the company differentiates itself in such a vast market.

“We differentiate ourselves in many ways; however, the most important parts of our differentiation to our customers are price, quality and reliability of service. Our pricing model is a little bit different than all of those who are in the business along with us in that we don’t charge for the line or for the extension, we just charge by the concurrent call,” explained Johnson.

So if you have 10 extensions, for example, but only five to six employees are on the phone at the same time in a given day, the Voice Carrier only charges for the five or six lines being used, versus all 10 lines.

“This could be a great solution, especially if they are using another hosted provider,” Tehrani pointed out.

Johnson said that Voice Carrier is actually able to reduce its customers’ phone bills by more than half.

“We consistently, when flipping people from their normal Verizon/ AT&T (News - Alert) landline usage to our service including the telephone system, cut their phone bill by at least half, often times by up to 70 percent,” he said. “We again are converting many customers who have converted to voice Over IP in the past to our system because of our pricing, you have got to be able to deliver the quality and reliability of landlines at a price that is significantly lower in order to get the rest of those converges to happen. And that’s our primary goal in business.”

Voice Carrier’s technology is about 70 percent proprietary and 30 percent open source, with three developed technologies that have been integrated together, with 11 patents pending on its own technologies.

In terms of interoperability, Johnson said that is an area Voice Carrier excels because it is so flexible.

“As it turns out that is probably one of the legs we have on most of our competition in that you can use just about any handheld device along with our technology,” he said.

Voice Carrier allows the PBX (News - Alert) system in your business to communicate with your cell phone, your office phone, home phone, iPad, iPhone, etc., Johnson explained.

As for the future, Voice Carrier is content serving the SMB market for now, according to Johnson, but sees the potential for continued growth.

“We aren’t really trying to compete with the Ciscos of the world that are out to try and close Bank of America or Citibank. But the conceptual idea that we have is that we can deliver the service with equal quality and reliability to landlines at a much lower price with many more features and functions and put it up and get it running in a very short amount of time, shorter than just about anybody in the business,” he said.

Next for Voice Carrier, Johnson said, is growing its share of the marketplace, which has been shipping its products for the past six quarters. The company has been growing between 30-40 percent in the past year, according to Johnson.

“Our plan is to continue to grow and become a true, significant player in the massive switch that is happening right now from landline office technology to voice over IP technology,” Johnson said.