I just me with the energetic management team of Global Touch Telecom (GTT)and was pretty impressed with what they are up to. They sell hosted platforms for VoIP — be it residential or commercial. They purchased a company called Xcast Labs that built their own hosted platform including a session border controller and softswitch. Why build your own when these products are available on the open market? Well when the company decided to build these devices around the 2000 timeframe, there weren’t so many products on the market so they decided to build everything themselves.
This concept permeates the company as the soft client and everything else is 100% homegrown as they want to be in control of all aspects of the technology.
Their boxes can do provisioning and customer management and there is a lot of flexibility in the product allowing a road warrior for example to have a soft client only but not an ATA. Company execs tell me for about $25,000 you can become a Vonage.
One of the more interesting parts of our meeting was the discussion of PanAmSat and how GTT made VoIP calls on a portable Humvee-based WiFi hotspot. The company also owns SIPtalk, a retail product that caters to the consumer VoIP market. They tell me they have a huge deal in the works and will make announcement about a huge RBOC soon.
