Voxbone and CallTower announced this week that CallTower is using the Voxbone international Dial Network to extend CallTower Complete 2013 for Lync, to the PSTN. As part of the agreement, Voxbone will provide CallTower’s multinational customers with geographical, mobile and toll-free telephone numbers from more than 50 countries. Voxbone will also provide number portability from more than 35 countries to migrate enterprises with a traditional ISDN-based telephone service and PBX to CallTower’s services.
This agreement matches up Voxbone’s extensive dial access network and CallTowers UCaaS offers based on Cisco and Microsoft. For users, it enable participants to get access to conference calls and other services from local dial numbers in 50 countries. This is a critical extension to the current Lync based and North American PSTN access.
However, in talking with Dries Plasman of Voxbone, he talked to an extension to this service based on WebRTC. Voxbone has added a WebRTC option to their international network. For users that have Internet access in a country, instead of using the PSTN to dial a local number, they can choose to use Voxbone’s WebRTC solution. For the Voxbone customer, this traffic is delivered over the same SIP trunks as the PSTN dial traffic. For CallTower, this is offering a new and unique solution. When someone is invited to a Lync session, they can join using Lync or they are offered to join using the Internet with WebRTC as the back-end protocol. Based on using the IP address, CallTower can implement the WebRTC directly in the U.S. or hand it off to Voxbone if the user is not in North America. In that case, Voxbone implements the WebRTC connection, back into their network and delivers the voice as SIP traffic on the SIP trunk. This allows Voxbone to use their location optimization and backhaul capabilities to improve QoS and experience.
This points out another advantage of WebRTC, the ability to make an active decision on how a communications is managed, without the user actually knowing that the methods are different. For a user, clicking on the “Use the Internet” option will result in a quick connection, but the implementation of that can be optimized to geography and service. This allow CallTower to have a ubiquitous service, while optimizing both cost and user experience.
We have talked about how WebRTC will enable innovation, and this is another example of using the capabilities that are exposed in WebRTC to innovate in both technology and the business model.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
