Equant sees surge in VoIP

Equant today said it has seen an 85% increase in customer sites using VoIP services, driven by the global carrier’s expansion into new markets and per-minute price cuts in its enterprise packet telephony offer. Equant also announced it was expanding its VoIP service into 15 new countries.

Equant, an international subsidiary of France Telecom, now has 1300 enterprise sites using VoIP over its MPLS IP backbone and IP VPN, 600 of which were added in the past 12 months. The growth represents both new customers signing up for service and existing multinational customers expanding the service to new sites across the globe, said Michael Burrell, head of enterprise telephony for Equant’s products and solutions group. About 130 enterprise customers now use the VoIP VPN service, more than 10% of Equant’s overall customer base. With the addition of the 15 new markets, Equant can now offer VoIP service to 93 of the 145 countries in its IP VPN footprint.

"That’s double the number of any of our competitors," Burrell said. "A lot of other service providers are just bringing their services online, launching late last year or this year. We’ve had a VoIP service in place since February of 2000."

Equant still plans to move aggressively into its footprint as it receives regulatory approval from individual government, Burrell said. While Equant has the technology and support in place to offer service in all of those countries now, regulatory hurdles in the remaining markets are high. Regulators from developing countries try to protect their former or current state monopolies and they often dictate artificially high rates in order to infuse cash into their economies. Surprisingly though, developing countries are where the service is most popular, particularly in Latin America and Eastern Europe where legacy telecom infrastructure is underdeveloped.

"Take Poland for example," Burrell said. "The whole country is basically run off of one Class 5 switch, and voice quality is terrible. VoIP is actually a vast improvement in voice quality there."

Equant also announced it would push aggressively into its existing VoIP footprint. The carrier is dropping prices for off-net VoIP calls an average of 30% worldwide. Equant’s parent company France Telecom is offering hosted IP PBX services to small and medium business and enterprise branch offices over Equant’s network.