Sprint today launched a new Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solution for enterprises - essentially a SIP trunking (IP Centrex) solution. This is big news considering another big telecom player, Level3 gave up on enterprise VoIP trunking months ago when they killed 3Tone. As I said in my AGN Communications post from a few days ago, maybe SIP trunking has come of age and Level3 was just a little bit ahead of the market demand? According to Sprint, "Sprint IP Voice Connect combines voice and data communications on a single IP network while securely supporting integrated and next generation applications."
Sprint IP Voice Connect is a network-based hosted telephony product offering local and long distance services as well as PBX and traditional Centrex features over Sprint's Dedicated IP or Global MPLS network. Sprint's secure carrier-grade service is enabled by Lucent Technologies' Hosted VoIP Solution for Enterprises through its Global Network Operations Centers. It can replace or integrate with customer premises-based telephony systems. Sprint IP Voice Connect service can:
- Reduce long-distance expenses and capital expenditures
- Simplify network management and optimize network expenditures
- Provide immediate VoIP benefits without migration pain
- Enhance productivity by allowing employees to work effectively anywhere, anytime
- Protect against service outages and technology obsolescence
Sprint IP Voice Connect allows enterprises to take advantage of advanced standards-based session initialization protocol (SIP)-based VoIP capabilities while still leveraging current investments in legacy voice systems. Existing dialing plans and telephone numbers are used, making implementation easy for both network administrators and end-users. Sites or individual users can be migrated one at a time, allowing a scaled implementation at any pace. Customers stay productive in or out of the office with advanced features made available from a variety of devices. These features include: simultaneous ringing to multiple phones, unified messaging and abbreviated dialing.Company administrators can easily manage and configure new and existing accounts and manage virtual dial plans on demand with a full-featured web-based administrator portal.
"Sprint is a leading provider of integrated voice and data services to customers, whether they are at their desk, at home or away from the office," explained Randy Ritter, Sprint vice president for product marketing. "IP Voice Connect is a building block for us to deliver a converged wireless and wire line customer experience."Sprint plans to deploy additional integrated wire line and wireless capabilities during 2006, using the Lucent Converged Voice for Enterprise Solution to provide subscribers all of the features of their office PBX system on their mobile phones.
The service is available in most major metropolitan areas, specifically 251 MSAs in 47 states.
Sprint offers service level agreements (SLA) for all critical metrics for voice over IP quality items such as jitter, delay and packet loss. Sprint also offers SLAs for site implementation, mean time to repair and proactive outage notification. Sprint IP Voice Connect is a carrier grade service built with internal survivability (multiple connections between partners along with redundant data centers).Customers may maintain communications even during an outage or disaster since the customer's phone service is housed in the network rather than a physical location and no longer dependent on that physical location's availability.
Sprint offers business customers IP Voice Connect flexible and scalable migration options with simplified per seat pricing for basic or enhanced feature packages and options for more functionality based on the customers needs. More info at sprint.com/business/products/products/voip.jsp
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