Internode targets business market with VoIP service upgrade

Stuart Corner
Friday, 01 February 2008 00:10

Business IT - Technology

ISP Internode has added a multiline option to its NodePhone VoIP service, describing the move as a key step in the evolution of NodePhone into a fully featured, corporate-grade IP telephony service. A standard NodePhone service comes with two voice channels. Customers can now request additional lines themselves using NodePhone's online toolbox. The fee is $10 per channel per month, plus a one off $20 change request charge. The multiline facility delivers extra call capacity by providing additional channels when NodePhone is connected to an IP-based PBX system.

Internode’s product manager for NodePhone, Jim Kellett, said: "a rapidly growing business that requires 10 more voice channels for their phone system can now place their order online, without any human intervention or queue bottlenecks, and have the extra channels up and running within a few minutes. If they only need this extra capacity for a limited period, they can just as easily relinquish any surplus channels when the demand is over."

He added: "As a comparison, a traditional ISDN phone service can up to four weeks to provision, can cost more than $800 in upgrade fees and generally incurs nearly three times the cost per channel. Extra channels for ISDN primary rate services must also be ordered in groups of 10."

NodePhone was launched in 2005 and in 2007 signed up its 10,000th customer. Kellett said Internode intended to continue enhancing its NodePhone service throughout 2008. "Our goal is make NodePhone the IP telephony service of choice for Australian businesses."

The multiline option is only for customers with their own IP PBX. In April 2007, Internode launched NodePhone2 : an IP centrex service using the BroadSoft BroadWorks hosted IP telephony platform. Internode claims that, unlike many VoIP offerings NodePhone does not rely on the unpredictability of the Internet: traffic is carried entirely on Internode's private IP network to and from the interconnection point with the public switched telephone network. However, users do not have to be on an Internode broadband access to use NodePhone.