Global Crossing, a global IP solutions provider, announced it has extended its Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Local Service to include four new countries in mainland Europe, enabling enterprise and carrier customers to reach a total of 25 countries worldwide and more than 500 cities across Europe. The company also announced a variety of enhancements that make the service even more useful for customers.
Global Crossing VoIP Local Service is now available in the Czech Republic, Greece, Poland and Slovakia. The service provides local origination of direct inward dialed numbers from major business centers throughout Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America, offering customers a cost-effective single IP connection to support today's advanced IP Telephony and Unified Communications (UC) applications. VoIP Local Service is part of Global Crossing's suite of SIP Trunking Services.
"We're continuing to expand the availability and flexibility of our Local VoIP Service globally," said Dave Carey, chief marketing officer. "As a leading global provider of VoIP services, Global Crossing is committed to broadening the geographic reach of our SIP transport services to support the demand for multinational enterprise IP Telephony and UC deployments. With support for over 70 different IP-based vendor devices on the network, Global Crossing is uniquely positioned to meet the needs of customers looking to move away from a traditional telephony solution."
The expanded VoIP Local Service comes at a time when Global Crossing is experiencing increasing demand for its VoIP Services. In the first quarter of this year, 3.3 billion IP interconnected minutes traversed Global Crossing's VoIP network, representing a growth rate of 58 percent compared to the first quarter of 2008. IP Interconnected minutes represent more than 40 percent of total VoIP minutes.
To better meet this demand, the company also has enhanced its VoIP Local Service to include support for national numbers in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway and Spain. Enterprises in those countries can now use one national prefix that functions as an area code for the entire country, which results in lower calling rates than standard international rates. Another enhancement to VoIP Local Service is the expansion of local number portability in Europe. This convenient feature, which allows customers to retain their existing numbers, is now available in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden, as well as the United Kingdom and the United States.
"As enterprises look more and more to deploy VoIP services on a localized level, it is essential that providers can respond to and offer these types of services to serve international markets," stated Dustin Kehoe, Principal Analyst at Current Analysis. "The expanded geographic availability of VoIP Local Service to 25 countries worldwide firmly places Global Crossing among the market leaders in this space. The enhancements introduced with this latest release - such as national number support, intra-country dialing features, and better VoIP reporting functionality -- offer additional benefits to enterprises."
Other recent enhancements to Global Crossing's VoIP Services include a VoIP utilization statistics application available to customers via uCommand. uCommand is Global Crossing's customer-facing Web portal, providing a window into the same systems used internally to support, bill, and provision customer circuits. This enhancement gives customers a real-time view into their SIP-based capacity utilization as well as historical trends to allow for traffic management and analysis. The enhancement also provides for capacity planning and augments based on peak utilization and average concurrent call use.
Last year, Global Crossing added SIP Refer to its offering suite. SIP Refer is a signaling protocol that enables more efficient use of IP networks and allows customers to transfer their voice and video calls, without attendant intervention. In 2009, Global Crossing established its relationship with Microsoft and became a qualified SIP Trunking provider for customers deploying Microsoft OCS 2007 R2. This means that if a customer elects to use OCS for voice service, Global Crossing can provide SIP Trunking as part of the solution.
Global Crossing's global, fully meshed MPLS-based network ensures that VoIP calls are delivered with minimal latency, packet loss and jitter - a consistent and predictable call quality not possible with voice services based on public Internet transport.
Global Crossing's VoIP Local Services are part of its VoIP services that includes Global Crossing VoIP Outbound, which processes traditional long distance and international long distance; Global Crossing Toll-Free; Global Crossing VoIP Local Service; and Global Crossing VoIP On-Net Plus, which provides customers on-net to on-net calling capabilities that support cross-protocol routing schemes and network-defined private dialing plans. In addition, Global Crossing VoIP Consulting Service provides customers access to professional VoIP engineers and Global Crossing's state-of-the-art VoIP Interoperability Labs for equipment, call flow and feature testing; security, protocol and IP Signaling compatibility; and specialized customer requirements.