Verizon beefs up business VoIP

Verizon Business today announced enhancements to its VoIP portfolio intended to make VoIP deployment easier and more beneficial to its enterprise customers. The enhancements, which include a Verizon interoperability lab at which customers can test their premises equipment prior to deploying VoIP, are the next step in a continuing process to both enable more businesses to combine their voice and data services and encourage them to do so.

“We have now been able to identify that quantifiable value of VoIP – the ‘wow’ factor,” said Karen Gergelyi, global VoIP trunking services product manager at Verizon Business. “This will continue as we work toward closer integration of our unified communications and we get to network and carrier interoperability on VoIP. We are working on those last two.”

Verizon Business’ European customers will now be able to enjoy the automatic call re-routing feature for VoIP that has been popular in the US, Gergelyi said.

“It provides inbound failover and load balancing – calls can fail over from one IP address to another automatically and at no cost,” Gergelyi said. “You can pre-configure the failover points, so the failover is automatic. During initial provisioning, we will provide multiple IP addresses and say that in the event of an outage such that the primary IP address is unavailable, VoIP calls will be re-routed through an alternate IP address either to the same or a diverse site.”

This capability, which has been available in the US for 18 months, enables business continuity during outages but also can be used to do load balancing to evenly distribute traffic to all points, Gergelyi said. “In Europe, it’s compelling because it means you might have inbound traffic intended for the UK but if that location is down, you can re-route to a completely different country.”

Businesses tend to deploy the failover option for survivability, Gergelyi said, “But they like the benefit of being able to distribute traffic.”

The interoperability lab will not replace Verizon’s certification process for IP-PBXs, but it will enable customers to test their existing equipment for interoperability to know it will work before deploying the service, Gergelyi said.