Broadview Networks is taking its hosted VoIP service national along the road less traveled — it’s not simply riding the public Internet, but a fully managed IP MPLS backbone. On the sales side, it’s taking an easier route, enlisting the channel to evangelize the virtues of its OfficeSuite service.
Broadview has been offering OfficeSuite since 2005 in its 12-state territory covering the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. As of Aug. 31, it will be available in 42 additional LATAs for a total of 57 LATAs. One of the differentiating features of the service always has been that it can be delivered three ways: BYOB or T1 DIA over the public Internet or via a private IP network. Rather than rollout the service half-baked, the company’s executives decided to wait until it could provide quality of service and class of service controls across the country.
To do this, the company has forged agreements with underlying carriers willing to offer Option B network-to-network interfaces that match transfer QoS and CoS, explained Broadview COO Brian Crotty. As a result, he added, “We can offer full SLAs anywhere nationwide. So your phone calls would never go over the public Internet.”
Furthermore, Broadview has expanded its switch routing capabilities to accommodate the expected increase in traffic and also arranged for local number and E911 across the country.
Crotty said beefing up the network was a major part, but not the only part of preparing to take the OfficeSuite product nationwide.
To give it more control over its service, Broadview announced Aug. 5 its intent to acquire the software and source code behind OfficeSuite from Natural Convergence Inc. (NCI). Broadview has been licensing NCI’s Silhouette hosted VoIP application since 2004 and worked closely with the platform vendor on developing services and features for small and medium businesses. In addition to allowing Broadview to respond more quickly to customer requirements, the NCI platform will be a “building block” for the carrier to offer fixed mobile convergence applications.
Crotty said Broadview already had designed ordering and provisioning processes that would scale, enabling it to turn up thousands of OfficeSuite stations a month. To date, it has more than 30,000 stations deployed. What it didn’t have was a nationwide field force. That it plans to deliver through outsourcing contracts as it has done within its legacy footprint. No vendors have been announced publicly.
