Business VoIP cuts costs and red tape
NodePhone Business Trunks offers greater flexibility and lower costs than ISDN OnRamp services that have traditionally met the needs of growing businesses with from a handful of employees to hundreds.
The new service costs from $25 a month for a range of 100 phone numbers. NodePhone Business Trunks works with IP-enabled telephone PABX systems, ranging from open source solutions such as Asterisk to fully-featured enterprise systems such as the Cisco UC500 or Cisco Call Manager.
Internode Product Manager Philip Dempster said NodePhone Business Trunks had evolved from customer demand for a multi-channel Voice over IP telephone service. "Customers were asking us for access to the service that Internode has used internally for several years," he said.
"During the past year, we have worked with a number of customers to design a product that meets the needs of businesses which require a cost-effective and flexible telephone service."
Carbon Planet is a rapidly growing Australian company that has used NodePhone Business Trunks since last year as part of Internode's product development. With six offices and 60 employees nationally, Carbon Planet is a global carbon management company that works with businesses around the world to quantify the risks and explore the opportunities emerging from a carbon-constrained economy.
Carbon Planet Founder and Executive Director David Sag said the NodePhone Business Trunks service had supported the company's growth. "We took a plunge at the start, but it has paid off," he said.
"As a rapidly growing company, we wanted a telephone system that was flexible enough to cope with our evolving needs. The system lets us register our direct dial number on any handset in our offices so that all incoming calls to that number will come to that handset."
"NodePhone provides much lower call costs. We get free phone calls between our offices in Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth and Melbourne and untimed national calls cost just 18 cents."
"It also offers Quality of Service (QoS) management to guarantee call quality. The integration of NodePhone with our data network means, even when I'm on the road, I can take a call on my laptop and transfer it to the office. It also offers many future benefits as we integrate the service with our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ticket-tracking systems."
NodePhone Business Trunks is available within local call zones for Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. Customers require an IP PBX phone system to utilise this service and a high speed broadband service, with symmetrical bandwidth of 100 kilobits per second for each channel.
NodePhone Business Trunks starts with two channels, allowing two concurrent phone conversations. An online NodePhone Toolbox allows customers to increase the number of channels immediately.
Each service has a 100-number range, with increases in multiples of 100. Each 100-number in-dial range has a once-off setup fee of $50 and a monthly fee of $25. Each channel costs $50 to setup and $10 per month to maintain. NodePhone service plans cost from $5 per month which include $10 of call credits.
