VoIP

Customers Don't Realize What VoIP Can Do

We talk to a VoIP solution maker and one of their more interesting niche customers about what is possible now and what the future may bring.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [September 12, 2005]

We last spoke to Nathan Franzmeier, founder and CEO of Allen, Tex.-based Emergent Network Solutions, late last year, when we learned about his company's VoIP product with integrated billing and provisioning system, ENTICE.

We're back, this time to learn about the big picture. Franzmeier has some perspective on the business. His company was, more or less, once a business unit of Lucent. "We started out in the wholesale business in 1993," he explains. "We've been dabbling in VoIP since 1997."

He sees ISPs skilled in data services learning about the telephony world, and telephone companies learning about the data world.

He's just been talking to a major webhost, and the ideal would be to make VoIP as simple as webhosting. A VoIP customer should be able to add or remove services from a web page. A VoIP provider should have resellers. There should be a VoIP control panel as intuitive and reliable and extensible as the best webhosting control panels on the market.

It needs to be flexible, because you want the customer to innovate. The customer can decide to do an action if the * button is pressed. The VoIP provider could interject a voice message at any time during the call warning the end user that they're about to run out of minutes.

There are technical issues as well. A company with a global presence may want to have session control be local, but may need billing in a central location, especially if there are resellers. If you're handing off traffic to a carrier, you may not want to reveal the identity of the customer.

For billing, the company offers flexibility. "We can integrate into RADIUS billing packages. We can let the ISP bill using their billing software, or we can send them a bill they can add to their line item. We can also deliver Call Detail Records (CDRs) for companies that want to handle the billing process on their end."

Edge technical issues are also important. Most CPE these days, Franzmeier notes, is behind a firewall. NAT transversal is a key feature of any VoIP system.

As always, we ask whether Emergent sells retail as well as wholesale. "We don't sell directly. We typically start with a system that can handle 1,000 simultaneous calls (generally 10,000 subscribers). Some of our competitors have smaller systems that start at 10 simultaneous calls. We don't do that because our background is in the wholesale space handling very high call volumes. Over time, we've added features."

That leads directly to the next question, about what Emergent plans for the future. Franzmeier says the company is working on products for the mobile space, for handling the 911 issue, and other features.

"We're also working on the 'click here to create your company' concept," he adds. "We're working on database and GUI concepts, on '15 minutes and you're a VoIP carrier.'"

The China company
Emergent introduces us to Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada)-based AIC Global Communications, a company that specializes in serving Chinese-speaking communities around the world.

Andy Boule, the company's technical director, says they started as a long distance company in 1992. Then the company moved into internet access and the mobile and paging space. The company launched a portal, FUNFUN2.COM, but the crash occurred shortly after the launch. The company uses FUNFUN2 for branding, and is building a community web space there, but the original plans, to deliver IPTV and entertainment and news, have not progressed far.

The company's VoIP operation is relatively new. It has been a customer of Emergent since the end of 2003, and launched its VoIP product on March 28, 2004. "We have been looking at another softswitch," says Boule. "But they were not able to do what we needed. The company went out of business. We had been looking at Emergent just for NAT transversal initially, but we came to realize they could do a lot more."

AIC still uses its in-house billing system, which runs on Oracle. But it uses the Emergent interface to download CDRs from around the world, to provision new customers and classes of service, and to bill resellers and white label providers of AIC's service.

Oliver Ma, AIC marketing director, explains that the company needs to provide what resellers want. "A white label customer can choose to have it hosted on our platform, or we can show them how to build a stand alone system for their front end and use us for billing and routing."

AIC has chosen a community with a real demand for what VoIP can provide. AIC's global presence, including white label services and joint ventures, covers most of Asia, including China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines, as well as Canada. Extended families often include relatives in distant countries. So a family in Vancouver with relatives in Hong Kong can buy a device with a local number in Hong Kong and talk to their distant relatives without spending a fortune.

Businesses in Vancouver can have local numbers in every city that contains a significant Chinese population, and have multiple DIDs on the same physical line. "A line for Hong Kong, one for Vancouver, and one for Toronto that all ring in the same office can be very good for business," says Boule.

Plans for the future
The company is already large, with well over 100,000 subscribers, and a growing VoIP business that recently broke 2,000. Though large, the company can grow. Ma says, however, that AIC is wary of offering services that customers don't want.

"We're educating the market, especially end users and the SME market. Traditional telecom services offer only certain features, and we can already improve on those. Traditional video conferencing, for example, is quite expensive, not just in terms of a per minute rate, but also in terms of hardware. And that's just the beginning. The technology is available for a wide variety of services, but the market may or may not be ready. In a few years, the market will be ready."

—End