ZCorum offers a wide range of services in addition to hosted VoIP, putting the company in a unique position to meet a number of different outsourcing needs.

by Jeff Goldman [July 18, 2007]

ZCorum was founded as a retail ISP in 1995, but soon shifted its focus to wholesale services—the company now provides a wide range of outsourced services, including DSL, cable, 24/7 customer support, consulting, and VoIP, among others.

While any individual service can be accessed on its own, company vice president Rick Yuzzi says one advantage to working with ZCorum for a combination of services—say, VoIP, data services, and customer support—is that all issues can be resolved in one place. "When a VoIP customer calls in and they're having a problem, that problem can range from anything with the cable modem connection to something on the VoIP switch," he says. "So it's good to have the support person be able to walk them through everything."

ZCorum P.O. Box 1376 Alpharetta, GA 30009 Tel: (800) 909-9441 Fax: (678) 507-5001 E-mail: info@ZCorum.com

The company's wholesale VoIP offering, VoiSelect, is relatively new—it was launched early in 2007. Yuzzi says the company's intention is to make VoiSelect distinct from popular offerings like Vonage, Packet8, or SunRocket by focusing specifically on call quality and reliability.

Most VoIP solutions, Yuzzi says, will inevitably see mixed results depending on the quality of the network. "We work with our providers to make sure that they've got a good quality network setup for VoIP, that the network between our provider and the switch is good, that there's low latency, low jitter, those kinds of things," he says.

Customer control
And Yuzzi says the VoiSelect service offers all the functionality an end user would expect. "There's a customer portal that includes features like call waiting, caller ID, three-way calling, voicemail," he says. "And the voicemail you can check online—you can log into the portal and listen to it there, as well as through the handset."

Through the customer portal, end users can view call detail records, activate or deactivate voicemail, and activate or deactivate caller ID.

VoiSelect's call filtering functionality can be used to forward calls to voicemail or to any other number, and can also be set up to respond differently to different incoming numbers—sending your wife's calls directly to your cell phone, say, or responding to telemarketers with a busy signal.

The voice over IP application and back-end services for VoiSelect are provided by a third party. Yuzzi won't say who it is, but he says ZCorum is the company's only reseller. "We're partnered very closely with them," he says.

A residential focus
In terms of an ISP's target customers, VoiSelect is currently focused on the residential market, with basic small business services available as well. Still, Yuzzi says that while any enterprise installation is inevitably a more complicated sale, such services can also be arranged—anything from installing a full IP Centrex solution to integrating with a company's legacy installed PBX.

While ZCorum as a rule doesn't publish its pricing, Yuzzi is quick to boast that the company's pricing is "excellent." While it varies slightly depending on the end user's location, he says the usual pricing structure is based on unlimited local and long distance in the United States and Canada, with good rates for calls outside that area as well.

ZCorum also offers separate CALEA compliance services through a partnership with trusted third party Martin Group.

Expertise and reliability
A key differentiator for ZCorum's VoIP offering, Yuzzi says, is the broad range of markets the company already serves with all of its other outsourced services—giving it both a marketing reach and a level of technical expertise beyond that of most of its competitors.

As a result, Yuzzi says the VoiSelect service can be as reliable as the ISP partner wants it to be. "The more reliability you build into it, the more expensive it's going to be—if the provider's willing to get a dedicated connection to the switch, then it can be very reliable," he says. "But even without that, we can control the reliability to a pretty high degree by making sure that we have good connectivity, even through the public Internet, from the provider to the switch."

The point, Yuzzi says, is that a lot of competing providers are reselling VoIP services without the expertise to back it up. "Anybody can resell a VoIP service, and hang up a shingle and not do anything other than resell the service, but we add a lot of value on the engineering side and on the technical support side," he says.

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