Keeping overseas call costs reasonable has always been challenging. Thanks to a new partnership between
Phone.com and
Voxbone, they will become easier to make and more affordable.
Phone.com (
News -
Alert), a hosted IP PBX provider aimed at the SME market, has selected Voxbone to supply DID (direct-inward-dial) numbers outside of the U.S. Phone.com users who work Stateside but who have clients in 45 other countries can choose telephone numbers in those countries that when dialed will ring to their Phone.com ‘Virtual Office.’ The service’s customized auto attendant then can ask for the called person’s extension number and complete the call. Through Voxbone’s (
News -
Alert) on-demand DID number services and real-time platform, Phone.com offers a seamless, reliable, and easy-to-use solution for the cost of one short PSTN overseas phone call.
With Phone.com and Voxbone foreign-terminating calls are local to callers; Voxbone carries them over its managed IP network to Phone.com, which routes them to end-customer with no perceptible delay. Phone.com customers pay a flat monthly rate for each DID. The numbers can also be directed to ring home phones or cell phones, and to change routing by time-of-day rules. DIDs can be ordered for all included cities and countries through Phone.com’s self-service web site, and paid for, like all of the provider’s services, with a credit card.
Here’s an example. Say you run a small translation bureau, specializing in Portuguese to English. You have a web site that gets many hits from Brazil. If you use the hosted PBX (
News -
Alert) service of phone.com, you can pay an extra $12.88 a month to have (and post) a phone number in Brazil that rings any of your business phone extensions in the U.S.
“Phone.com’s Virtual Office helps our small business customers look big by running big-company voice applications like automated attendant and conferencing,” says Ari Rabban (
News -
Alert), CEO of Phone.com. “Voxbone’s DIDs in foreign markets help our customers look international, and even transact internationally. We chose Voxbone for its long record of reliability, and its ability to aggregate and send us traffic collected from several points overseas. They also have the SIP adherence we needed to operate interactively with touch-tone response, so that callers in foreign markets can dial for extensions.”
Brendan B. Read is TMCnet�s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan�s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Jessica Kostek
