ISPhone morphs into wholesale telco

Stuart Corner
Monday, 23 July 2007 16:47

Your IT - Home IT

VoIP wholesaler ISPhone is evolving into a full scale wholesale telecommunications service provider with the launch of wholesale ADSL2+ services on the Optus DSLAM network and plans to offer PSTN telephone services.

The ADSL service is targeted at the small business market and is designed to deliver them a business grade VoIP service by providing dedicated capacity for their VoIP traffic from their premises into ISPhone's VoIP switch.

According to ISPhone CTO, James Spenceley, '"This announcement is a clear sign that ISPhone has successfully transitioned from business-grade provider to wholesale telecommunications carrier. With these new services our ISP and ITSP [Internet telephony service provider] partners will be able to effectively compete with, and provide end-users an alternative to, the established fixed-line provider."

He told iTWire: "In the future we will be able to offer someone a PSTN service, but we are not turning that on a present we will be making an announcement about that later."

He added: "[The ADSL service] is targeted at very small businesses that have typically been trying to run VoIP over their Internet link.

ISPhone will also offer, through its resellers, SHDSL and managed ethernet services. According to Spenceley, "Our channel partners are either offering IP PBX or they may be offering IP centrex services...We will probably making some announcements about customers next week."

Spenceley claimed that ISPhone was providing an "uncontended" ADSL service: It has provisioned the backhaul capacity to be equal to the combined peak throughput of all users and will increase backhaul capacity over time if peak demand levels increase.

ISPhone has also installed two new carrier-neutral points of presence (PoPs), at Global Switch in Sydney, and Global Centre in Melbourne. It plans to have a total of 14 across the country by June 2008 as "part of ISPhone's bid to get to the heart of the Internet in Australia."