At ITEXPO today I met with Hugh Goldstein of Voxbone to discuss their business and directions. As we talked an interesting fact emerged, Voxbone provides primarily INBOUND dialing from a large number of countries. Voxbone has a large poll of numbers, both toll free and charged that they enable their customers, other service providers and enterprises to access. The value is that with very little effort and initial costs, a range of countries can be accessed quickly so that a business offer can be delivered locally.
In the discussion an interesting point came out, Voxbone does not provide outbound dialing, that is procured typically though other vendors. In fact, many of the Voxbone end customers in a remote location where Voxbone is providing inbound services are using VoIP for internal communications. For these customers, Voxbone has added emergency dial out, but not general dial out.
As we discussed their business, I realized that they are implementing the concept of asymmetrical access. Asymetrical access is where inbound communications do not follow the same path, or even vendors as outbound communications. While Voxpone is providing this in a traditional SIP/voice implementation, it is exactly the same concepts that WebRTC is promising. I do not have to go through the same path and equipment for both inbound and outbound. While the Voxbone implementation does this through different vendors, WebRTC does it through different servers managing the communications.
Combining the Voxbone global representation through their global DID service with WebRTC based endpoints may provide an interesting new model for communications where all internal and many external communication are managed through the web paradigm, but there is still access for PSTN inbound communications.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
