VoX offers a wholesale VoIP service that the company says is as TDM-like as it gets.

by Jeff Goldman [May 9, 2007]

VoIP provider VoX Communications, located in Celebration, Florida, was founded two and a half years ago as a wholly owned subsidiary of New York-based CLEC Pervasip.

The reasons for the creation of the VoIP provider are obvious, according to Ron Harden, VoX's executive vice president of sales and marketing. "VoIP is a huge opportunity, not only for CLECs, but for ISPs and others that want to expand a business and want to secure their customers," he says.

VoX Communications 610 Sycamore Street Suite 120 Celebration, FL 34747 Tel: (800) 869-1699 Web contact form

While VoX was initially formed with the intention of focusing on both wholesale and retail customers, Harden says the company soon realized that it was virtually impossible to compete with Vonage's marketing machine for retail users. VoX now offers wholesale dialup to a wide range of providers, including cable operators, ISPs, CLECs, and various agents and resellers. "The people that can be really successful with VoIP are not the facilities-based guys—it's people that have a customer base that they can reach out and touch, or people that are just simply a marketing machine," Harden says. "And that's why I love the ISPs, because they are both."

One of the things that makes VoX stand out, Harden says, is the fact that much of the company's solution is proprietary. "We built our own softswitch, we built our own gateways, we built our own functionality, we built our own feature set," he says. "We still buy some off-the-shelf equipment—we use Dell servers, for example—but basically, the features, the technology, and the code are proprietary."

Harden says that makes it possible for VoX to respond very quickly to customer requests. About a year ago, he says, a customer asked for a way to ensure that calls went through even if the power was out. "Three days later, we had finished it such that if you go on our website, you can tell us where to send calls if the cable goes out or if the DSL goes out—and basically, for most everybody, including myself, it forwards to your cell phone," he says. "That way, if you ever do lose your cable or lose your power, you don't lose your calls."

The VoIP service
VoX handles all aspects of the VoIP offering for the ISP, except level one customer service and end-user billing. The ISP can either have VoX ship the ATAs directly to each end user, or purchase them in bulk from VoX. "Some cable operators and ISPs want to deliver the units to their customers," Harden says. "If it's a small regional ISP or cable company, that customer touch is really important to them."

The company uses an ATA from UTStarcom, which Harden says VoX didn't select until after a full seven months of testing. "Quality is important to us," he says. "And this is rock solid. If I sent you one, it would plug and play and self-configure."

All call records and customer information are available through a Web-based interface. "If you're an ISP and you're a wholesale customer of ours, and one of your customers makes a call, that ISP could go online in two minutes and see the call," Harden says. "The information is all at their fingertips."

While Harden says VoX is fully CALEA-compliant, he notes that that's not an easy thing to define. "Exactly what is required is not clear," he says. "The devil's always in the details, and we're still looking at that—we believe that we are certainly compliant to the extent that we can be."

What ultimately differentiates a VoIP service, Harden notes, is call quality—and he says VoX is as TDM-like as it gets. "If it's done right, the voice quality should be indistinguishable from TDM service—and I believe ours is," he says.

Pricing and contracts
Pricing for the wholesale service starts with a $5,000 deposit, but includes no minimum commitment—instead, there are six different volume thresholds at which the fees decrease. The deposit is required, Harden says, both to eliminate people who aren't serious, and because VoX bills once a month and gives you 15 days to pay. "In the bigger scheme of things, $5,000 is not very much—and if you cancel, you get the money back anyway—you can cancel the contract at any time," he says.

The ability to cancel with no penalty, Harden says, is an important principle. "We pride ourselves on the fact that there are no hidden charges—and if somebody tries us and doesn't like us and want to leave, we're not going to stick 'em," he says. "We don't feel that's right. If they choose to leave us, then we have failed and shame on us—we don't deserve to keep them, and we don't deserve to charge them for leaving us. Fortunately, because of that approach, we hardly lose any customers."

Regardless, Harden says, the pricing is structured so that "an ISP should be able to earn a good 35 to 40 percent margin on this business, with the price we charged them for an unlimited line versus the price that they should be able to sell it at." Any setup fees the ISP chooses to charge, plus fees for international traffic, will increase that margin.

— End