Sarah Hofstetter is a VoIP veteran as she was the head of PR for Net2Phone since the 1990s and has been in the IP communications space longer than just about anyone else out there. The reason I point this out is that Sarah now handles PR for XConnect, the global VoIP peering company. Recently, I just received some news from Sarah that she was able to frame nicely for all.

You see, XConnect has a new board member and this sort of thing does not generally constitute big news. But as Sarah points out, in this case the board member of this IP communications company is Dr. Paul Reynolds, the CEO of Telecom New Zealand and the former CEO of BT Wholesale.

This announcement is very big not only for XConnect but for the IP communications market as a whole. It is not like the market needs a legitimizer anymore but it is still nice to see that traditional telecom players are really seeing how powerful IP communications can be.

This sort of board addition certainly helps XConnect as it allows the company to leverage the relationships that Reynolds has and in addition, it is a nice thing to mention when you are courting large PTT customers worldwide.