360networks' wholesale VoIP offering gives providers access to tier two, three and four markets in the western United States.

by Jeff Goldman [September 5, 2007]

360networks was founded in 1987 as the telecommunications construction division of Ledcor Industries. In 1998, 360networks became a service provider, with the aim of building a global optical network. The company went public in 2000—just in time to get hit by the dot-com boom and become one of the first telecom companies to file for bankruptcy in 2001.

But according to Rick Coma, 360networks' senior vice president of business development, the timing wasn't all bad. "As we were going through the restructuring process, other telecom entities were beginning to file for bankruptcy," he says. "We took that as an opportunity to start acquiring some of those assets, restructuring them and rolling them into 360networks."

The purchase of Canada's Group Telecom in 2003, Coma says, helped the company enormously. "We held onto it for 18 months, flipped it to Bell Canada—and that was a great transaction for us," he says. "It allowed us to pay off all of our debt and really look at what opportunities we had, moving forward, in the U.S."

360networks' VoIP360 2101 4th Ave. #2000 Seattle, WA 98121 Tel: (800) 609-1025 Web contact form

The company is now focused on the western half of the United States, with a 17,200-mile fiber network that's based largely upon 360networks' purchase of Touch America's assets in 2003. "The unique feature that got us to where we are today is the ability to serve a lot of the smaller markets—tier two, three and four markets—with the ability to also hit the larger markets in the western United States," Coma says.

VoIP assets
With the assets of Touch America came a lot of interconnectivity to ILEC tandems and central offices, Coma says, "so we realized that there was an opportunity for us to come in with a next-generation VoIP platform on top of this asset, without having a lot of incremental costs associated with trunking and getting out to all the ILEC tandems."

And that proved to be a great benefit in offering wholesale VoIP. "In this business, like any of the other telecommunications businesses, there's competitors in this space, and those who own the infrastructure and are able to ride the cost curve down are the ones that are going to survive—and we're definitely in that boat," Coma says.

Coma says 360networks' wholesale VoIP service, VoIP360, now serves a wide range of providers with a straightforward offering. "For those that own a feature server, and those that have access to end users—whether it be as an ISP or a cable entity—we will provide all of the CLEC-type services to them," he says. "We provide the origination, the termination, the telephone numbers, inbound/outbound calling, and all the ancillary services that they need to deliver voice services."

To that end, Coma says, 360networks has established interoperability with most if not all of the major feature servers available. "We know that our network interoperates with them—so they can just have a simple IP connection, whether it be direct or via the public internet, to our platform, and they're off and going," he says.

The aim is to free VoIP360's clients to focus on their customers' needs. "The beauty of the product is that they don't have to go out and become a CLEC, they don't have to go out and establish trunking to the ILEC, they don't have to invest in softswitches, media gateways, session border controllers—that's all done on our platform," Coma says.

A la carte services
Still, if a provider already has some of those assets, they can also purchase only what they need—they're not locked into a predefined suite of a services. "We provide what I would call an a la carte menu of services," Coma says. "If they want to provide their own 911, or they want to do their SS7 connections, CNAME, whatever it might be, they don't have to get that from us," he says.

Pricing is available using either of two different models. "Customers that come to us may just buy services on a subscriber or telephone number basis, and it would be x dollars per telephone number or per subscriber—or… a trunk model, where the customers pay us a price per trunk, which is one call channel—and then they buy multiple telephone numbers and they oversubscribe their own trunks," Coma says.

For a larger provider that's scaling into the hundreds of thousands of customers, that can really make sense. "They know that not all of those subscribers are going to be off-hook and using the phone at the same time, so they're able to not buy as many trunks—and ultimately, that reduces their cost per subscriber," Coma says. "We're finding that customers really like that model, and are continuing to buy on that basis."

Coma says the fact that VoIP360 is specific to the western U.S. hasn't proved to be a limitation for most of the company's customers, who generally work with multiple carriers to support their offerings. "It hasn't limited us to date, except for those who only operate on the East Coast—obviously, we can't support them," he says.

At the same time, Coma says VoIP360 works with ISPs of every size. "We have been very open, especially in comparison to our competitors, to work with a lot of the smaller providers… we'll sit down and work with all of them, understand what their business models are, what their forecasts are—and if they're small but have got the ability to grow, it's pretty likely that we'll end up working with a lot of them," he says.

— End