CommPartners' VoIP offering benefits from the company's nationwide CLEC status.

by Jeff Goldman [May 16, 2007]

Las Vegas-based CommPartners was founded in June of 2003. Michael McGhee, the company's vice president of sales and business development, says CommPartners' foundation lies in its CLEC roots—the company is certified as a CLEC in 48 states, giving it key strengths like reliable local number porting, solid coverage and competitive pricing.

Still, CommPartners' key focus is on IP communications. Since its founding, McGhee says, the company's aim has been to overlay its traditional voice network with an IP network that allows it to offer a wide range of services.

CommPartners 3291 N. Buffalo Drive Suite 150 Las Vegas, NV 89129 Tel: (702) 367-VoIP (8647) Fax: (702) 365-VoIP (8647) Web contact page

And the voice network, McGhee says, pays for itself. "We built the network, and we didn't build it just to sell cheap dial tone," he says. "We are using the transport capability of our built network to terminate minutes for many, many customers out there—many large carrier customers—and it's a good business for us to be in: it basically pays for the cost of the network."

CommPartners' hosted services include a variety of IP-based solutions. "Behind that, we have a very robust back-office system that we own, that our application developers here maintain—it's an integrated capability that allows us to match the business needs of the various wholesale models that we sell under," McGhee says.

McGhee adds that that CommPartners is committed to the Asterisk market—the company hosts the industry site voip-info.org, and currently has more than 90 different flavors of Asterisk connected to its network. "A lot of times, hosted providers will consider Asterisk guys competitors," he says. "We don't. We think they're very important to the growth of IP telephony."

The wholesale offering
CommPartners' wholesale options include both private label and agent programs. "A partner will either sign up with us and go to training and then they're able to sell the services at a margin on a monthly recurring basis under their name—or in some cases… if somebody's not really prepared to be in the phone resale business, we'll bill the customer and kick them back a commission percentage," McGhee says.

In either case, McGhee notes, there's no retail CommPartners sales force out there competing with the company's partners. "You won't find us running around in CommPartners shirts knocking on doors," he says.

And for its entire IP offering, McGhee says, CommPartners focuses on business services for business users. "We do not focus on residential," he says. "We've found that that's a highly competitive and price-sensitive market, and we've found that ISPs that focus on business services do much better: they have better margins, better customer retention and lower support costs."

Mark Peterson, CommPartners' vice president of marketing and communications, adds that ISPs that target business users already have all the necessary infrastructure and expertise. "All of our partners who have a business focus typically are set up, and have the resources within their own company, to support a voice service," Peterson says. "They have the technical resources, they have the sales and marketing force, they've got the tier one support—they are really set up the best to succeed in this business."

Pricing and CLEC benefits
Pricing for the wholesale partner program starts with an initial fee of $2,500. "For that, they get demo systems, equipment, three days of onsite training here in Las Vegas, we of course then put an account manager on their team, and off they go," Peterson says. "We get them ready to sell."

After the initial fee, McGhee says, CommPartners' pricing is competitive. "And we do have some offerings that we think are below anybody's price—some of our SIP trunking products are extremely competitive," he says.

Partners also get access to CommPartners' full back-office capabilities, including the company's billing platform that allows the partner to set whatever retail pricing they want. "We can then generate bills for them on a retail level with their brand, or we can send them the billing information to incorporate into their existing billing—it's really flexible," McGhee says.

McGhee says CommPartners' CLEC status helps it in a number of ways, from CALEA compliance to local number porting. "We have interconnect access agreements negotiated with all of the major RBOCs just for that reason—when you go through a number porting process at CommPartners, we're truly the guys that are doing the work: we're not outsourcing it," he says.

And having raised $46 million in funding, McGhee says the fact that CommPartners is debt-free makes it a reliable partner for the future. "We have a very strong line of business that supports our network infrastructure costs, so we've a very stable company," he says.

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