International voip wholesale provider

Byline: Tim McElligott

WorldWide Telco joined the growing list of voice-over-IP providers last week when it announced it has deployed Excel Switching's CSP 2090 converged services platform to provide its wIPphone hosted service to resellers serving the residential and small business market.

WorldWide Telco, a wholesale VoIP provider, used Excel's programmable switching platform to develop its own SIP-based switching capabilities and feature sets that it will use to address the international calling market. The CSP 2090 platform will serve as an integrated media gateway, a registration server and media server.

The wIPphone service features free unlimited calls to other wIPphone subscribers, free phone to wIPphone calls, low rates for domestic and international calls and local access numbers in several international locations. It comes with its own downloadable softphone or works with other integrated access devices.

WorldWide Telco had developed a prepaid and post-paid calling card platform for the TDM network using Excel's programmable switch. It then tried to develop a separate platform for the VoIP market.

"We tried many combinations of solutions but there were too many bugs, too many headaches," said Eyal Yaari, chief operating officer at WorldWide Telco. "So after six months we went back to our Excel-based platform."

Excel used its years as a Lucent property (1999 to 2003) to pump $100 million more into research and development and IP-enable its platform before spinning back out on its own in June of last year. "By integrating multiple functions into a single platform, services are easier to develop and users don't have to worry about having multiple vendors trying to talk to each other," said Mike Twomey, vice president of product marketing at Excel Switching.

Yaari said the programmability of the Excel platform helps WorldWide Telco distinguish itself and its reseller customers from other VoIP providers. "What will separate the winners and losers in VoIP is the same thing that separated them in the pre-paid calling market: the ability to roll out features quickly - or at all," Yaari said.

WorldWide Telco maintains control over features and functionality in its wIPphone service in its core network, primarily its softswitch and the Excel switching platform. Other VoIP services - including those offered by Vonage, ICXs and RBOCs - use the customer premises devices, or analog terminal adapters, to control feature functionality, said Danny Klein, senior analyst for the Yankee Group's Communications Network Infrastructure Advisory service.

"[WorldWide Telco] was able to create Vonage-like features in a hosted environment," Klein said. "Because it is a programmable switch, and because they are not only a service provider but have the engineering team behind their applications, they are able to offer a lot of customized services."

WorldWide Telco isn't going after one particular geographic market, and it doesn't want to be any customer's primary line. But the company does believe it can grow an international presence quickly.

WorldWide Telco currently has 11,000 users. The wIPphone Web site translates in English, Hebrew, French and Spanish and is under development for more language support. Another distinguishing factor, Klein said, is that WorldWide Telco also has customer support in those languages.

"International calling is virgin territory [for residential VoIP] and has profit margins like the golden days of telecom where things were still at 30cents to 40cents per minute," Yaari said. In the U.S., on the other hand, "people are fighting over tenths of a penny and trying to knock each other out," he said.

"We are just a bunch of fleas on this big elephant," Yaari said. "We don't really bump heads except when trying to attack the domestic market."