The wholesale dialup provider Velocity West now offers wholesale VoIP for both business and residential end users. The company claims an advantage with proprietary software.

by Jeff Goldman [August 15, 2007]

In 2005, wholesale dialup provider Velocity West launched its wholesale VoIP offering, TeleMedium. Company CEO Noel Morgan says it was clear at the time that dialup was already on its way to becoming a sunset industry. "There's probably always going to be dialup, but it's definitely dwindling—it's not something that you're going to be looking to have a lot of growth with," he says.

On the other hand, Morgan says that for VoIP, the time was (and is) right. "I had been watching VoIP for some time," he says. "I knew that we probably wanted to get into it at some point, but I didn't want to get in too early, spend all the money and not have returns. We were looking for the apex in the market."

The company considered a wide range of different options in terms of third party providers and open source solutions, Morgan says, before deciding to build its own softswitch. "There wasn't anything that really had it all and could be managed the way we wanted to manage it," he says.

TeleMedium 1845 Summit Drive #400 Plano, TX 75074 Phone: (214) 556-4049 Fax: (214) 556-4052 Web contact form

Morgan says TeleMedium's proprietary softswitch, Pound ONE, is now made up of approximately 80 percent the company's own software and 20 percent open source components. "It still has some PBX features and some things that are open source projects, or components from those projects, but we're enjoying the multi-threaded, database-driven, very stable PBX system that we've developed in-house," he says.

And while he initially expected the offering to focus on residential customers, Morgan says he's found that there's a far more significant market among small businesses with 10 to 20 seats. "We also do overseas call centers, 150 seats at a time," he says. "We've got several of those right now. We've got some partners that are really going great guns out in the Philippines and in India."

Turnkey or a la carte
The key selling point of TeleMedium's offering, Morgan says, is the flexibility and responsiveness that come with the fact that everything is built in-house. "We just want people to understand that the buck stops here: we don't have anybody to call for support," he says. "We can move on a dime, and if somebody needs something special, we can accommodate them. We're really flexible, and we're really proud of that fact."

That also results, Morgan says, in a great give and take between the company and its customers. "We develop our product through the ideas of our customers … everybody has a slightly different business model, a different way of doing business, and so they want a different way of doing their communication," he says. "So we're accommodating them and developing our products around their ideas."

And it also applies to the set of services a provider might choose. An ISP can get a complete turnkey VoIP solution from TeleMedium, or can choose any part of it they like—just the softswitch, just the termination, etc. "You can bring your own software, and you can tap into our system through SOAP APIs," Morgan says.

For ISPs seeking a straightforward entry into the VoIP space, Morgan says, the wholesale offering covers everything they need, including billing. "We give you a signup on our application server, so on your website, they click a link ('Sign Up Now') and it goes to our application server, processes their order, and then brings them back to your success page," he says.

Flexible and cheap
Rather than forcing the customer to order a specific ATA (analog telephone adapter) or use a specific softphone, Morgan says TeleMedium supports a wide range of different end user devices. "And nobody ever has to set anything up—they just send it overnight, the consumer plugs it in, and it provisions automatically," he says.

Because TeleMedium itself doesn't touch the PSTN, Morgan says the company doesn't concern itself with CALEA compliance, but the third party carriers through which the company offers termination, he says, are all CALEA-compliant, and the company also offers E911 support through a partnership with HBF/911 Services.

Pricing for the offering varies depending on the range of services required and the number of customers served, but Morgan says it's extremely competitive at every level. "Our pricing is probably lower than anybody else's, because we don't have the licensing fees that some of our competitors are dealing with," he says.

And that's really what it comes down to. The company's value proposition, Morgan suggests, is extremely simple. "We're flexible, we're cheap, and we're the best," he says.

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