Voipfone

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Inet Telecoms Ltd
Type Limited liability company
Founded July 1, 2004
Headquarters London, United Kingdom
Key people Colin Duffy - Chief Executive Officer
Lee Rose - Chief Technical Officer
Industry Telecommunications
Products Voice over IP
Services VoIP for home and business

Voipfone is a UK (London) based Internet Telephone Service (VoIP) provided by Inet Telecoms Ltd. It develops standards based, telephony services using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

Voipfone builds hosted PBX services for small business also known as IPBX - Telephone Extensions, Call Queues and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. Other standard features of their service include Call Transfer, Music on Hold, Call Waiting, Call ID, Voice Mail, Voicemail to email, Fax to email, Call Conferencing, Three Way Calling.

They peer with other open VoIP networks, [1].

They provide preconfigured SIP hardware from Linksys, Snom, Siemens and UTStarcom.

Voipfone is a founder member of Internet Telephony Services Providers’ Association (ITSPA)[2].

Contents

[edit] Telephone number availability and usage

Voipfone provides UK and International Geographic numbers. Like other VoIP services, calls to Voipfone numbers from other Voipfone customers are free. They allow peering with other VoIP companies so that calls are free between them also.

With Internet Telephony, telephone numbers are independent of the town or city that the area code relates to. This means that a VoIP telephone can be taken anywhere in the world, plugged into a broadband network and calls to the number will be routed directly to it – wherever it is. This obviously has the added benefit of making office relocation simple, in telecommunication terms at least

[edit] Calls to Emergency Services

Voipfone provides access to Emergency services (999,112).

However, the location independent nature of VoIP (see above) creates problems for all VoIP operators as this is normally available to the emergency service operator from CLI information. Voipfone partially overcome this restriction by allowing customers to update their location information themselves as necessary

[edit] Virtual PBX, Centrex or Hosted PBX

Telephone Switchboards or private telephone exchanges (PBX) have been used by large corporations for many years but have always been unavailable to smaller businesses for cost or technical reasons. VoIP technology allows the services that blue chip corporations have taken for granted - telephone extensions and the ability to transfer calls between them, Call Queuing and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems - to be provided on a self service basic to small and even micro businesses.

Small businesses can pick the services they need off a list and configure them in real time from Voipfone’s web site. Because the system is hosted on their network and shared between many thousands of users it can provide sophisticated services at extremely low cost – usually just one or two pounds per month.

[edit] List of PBX Services

Voipfone’s PBX extensions have a suite of features including - Call Transfer, Music on Hold, Call Waiting, Call ID, Voice Mail, Call Conferencing, 3 Way Calling, Free Calls between extensions (wherever they are), business hours and line presentation.

[edit] Regulation of UK VoIP services

Voipfone conforms to all UK VoIP regulations as issued by Ofcom (Office of communications)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Voipfone About Us Page.
  2. ^ ITSPA Members.

[edit] External links