Apps Communications offers wholesale VoIP with a focus on reliability and quality of service—so much so that the company's president calls it "bulletproof."

by Jeff Goldman [March 28, 2007]

Apps Communications was founded in 1994 as the web design company Apps Associates Web Sites, or AAWS. In 1998, the company began offering broadband access in the Chicago area and changed its name to Apps Communications. "We were the first ones to launch a T-1 for $495 a month, and that included a free setup with a router and a firewall," says company president David Apps.

Apps Communications 10470 W 164th Place Orland Park, IL 60467 Tel: (800) 861-0540 Fax: (708) 873-1310 Web contact form

While the T-1 offering initially grew very rapidly, Apps says, DSL started to erode the company's business—so he began exploring a voice over IP offering. After bad experiences with a number of different nationwide providers, he decided to run it himself. The company now offers a range of wholesale VoIP services intended to help an ISP transform itself into a TSP, a telecommunications service provider.

The challenge in doing so, Apps says, is to offer a quality of service that's acceptable for business users. "If you're doing a residential account—where it's somebody talking to their brother, sister, uncle, whatever, but they're getting a really good price, like from Vonage or Packet8—if they have a little bit of quality of service issues, they're not too mad," he says. "But it's a whole different animal with commercial accounts."

From experiences with companies like Cbeyond, Comcast, and others, Apps says, he knew it was possible to offer VoIP service with five-nines reliability. "And finally, after a lot of testing, and after a lot of reworking our network, we came up with a solution that is bulletproof for us," he says.

Bulletproof VoIP
What's crucial in ensuring that kind of reliability, Apps says, is the quality of the connection itself. "I will not sell to somebody and just route over the open Internet, because that's a recipe for disaster—you cannot control the quality of the service," he says.

Instead, Apps requires one of two things for the service to work. "Either we have a dedicated circuit between us—or we do some serious testing to find out what our latency is going to average over a 35- or 45-day period, and hopefully we're both on the same Tier 1 provider," he says.

Apps uses SAVVIS and UUNET, now Verizon Business. "I'd like them to be connected to one of those, because I know that if they're going across the SAVVIS backbone, I won't have any problems," he says.

With that kind of reliability, Apps says he's able to offer VoIP to both business and residential customers. And for last mile connections to residential users, he's become a big fan of wireless. "We just had a bad windstorm here about a month ago, and I must have had 15 T-1s down," he says. "I didn't have one wireless system down—not one."

The company's wholesale VoIP offering doesn't have any required minimums. The key issues to cover in working with an ISP, Apps says, are to ensure the reliability of the connection, as described earlier—and to clarify the type of service to be offered, from basic VoIP to advanced features like remote location functionality.

Pricing and support
Apps says his pricing is competitive, particularly considering the quality of the service. "You could probably buy the service from a Packet8 cheaper than you could buy it from us, but you're not going to get the quality that you get with us—and you're not going to get the support," he says.

Just one call to the company, Apps says, and the quality of the support is easy to assess. "A real person picks up the phone," he says. "There is a real, 24-hour tech support line. There is an emergency tech support line. People call you back. People take care of your issues—and we will also help you resolve issues in your own network."

Still, wholesale VoIP is not as simple to offer as, say, wholesale dialup. "ISPs needs to be familiar with the tax laws that have passed in the last year," Apps says. "VoIP is no longer tax-free: there are taxes, and the fines are pretty steep—and they're going to come after these people."

That said, Apps says any ISP that's seriously considering offering VoIP should look into getting CLEC certification. "I was talking to a guy the other day—he was on a different backbone than us, and our traceroutes didn't come out that well—and he said, well, who can I buy VoIP from?" Apps says. "I said, if you're not buying it from me, don't buy it from anybody—go out and get yourself some PRI lines."

Apps says that same attitude pervades all aspects of his offering. "I don't sell anybody anything unless I absolutely believe that I'm the best service for them," he says. "I don't sell people: I educate them—and once I've educated them, if I'm the best solution for them, they'll make that choice."

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