May 9, 2009

Behind The Scenes Of Your Next Telephone Call: How ifbyphone is Changing Telephony

Making a telephone call is pretty simple. You pick up the phone, dial a number and talk. The process that happens between you picking up the phone (or pressing a button) and hearing the person (or their wonderful voice mail) on the other end happens quite fast.

For businesses, however, that want advanced telephony features, things are a bit more complicated.

If you want an interactive voice response system (IVR), voice broadcast, store locator (have a call routed to a location based on its originating telephone number) or other features - you have to ensure your carrier can offer you these features.

Many telephone systems can offer some features but few of them can offer all the features you might need. What ifbyphone hopes to do is to provide a white label service to telephone companies to enable them to offer powerful, small business features, to their customers, powered by ifbyphone.

Google Voice offers a huge number of features - but maybe not all the features you need.

Virtual telephone providers such as Virtual PBX, Ring Central , Onebox and Gotvmail offer a range of solutions for solo entrepreneurs and growing small businesses.

The traditional telephone companies (incumbent local exchange carriers - ILEC) such as AT&T, Verizon and MCI or competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC) such as Covad, XO, Comcast and so many others offer a range of solutions as well, but their core business is selling telephone services to ISPs (like Earthlink) who resell it to local customers.

With ifbyphone's new service, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking carriers can connect to Ifbyphone and route certain calls to “smart ports” on the Ifbyphone platform, yet retain origination and termination.

You might not care about this kind of "behind the scenes" developments right now, but being aware of these kind of developments is very important in order to know the opportunities available to your growing business.

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