Telia launches advanced hosted PBX services

Scandinavian telecommunications service provider Telia has launched an advanced hosted PBX service for commercial users in Sweden, using equipment from Sylantro Systems.

The first incumbent service provider in Europe to take these steps, Telia tested the technology with Sylantro for a year. It offers the hosted PBX services on two levels, said Andreas Lang, VoIP product manager for Telia Internet Services.

“One is to offer the existing [400,000 broadband] customers IP VPN services since they have all the bandwidth,” he said. “The other approach is to swap out the existing CPE equipment and give them a very good switch with good functionality so they can throw out the existing PSTN lines and go to broadband services.”

The end user can either invest in CPE hardware and software and maintain the system or use Telia’s evergreen hosting service so “they don’t have to bother about things like that,” Lang said.

Telia targets businesses sized around 200 users per site with an offering that includes a suite of applications and an application server, as well as Cisco media gateways, routers, IP phones and other peripheral devices. Larger business customers are showing interest in the offering, as well, Lang said.

While IP is relatively commonplace in Europe, Telia’s service, “being a PBX replacement, is quite unique,” said Laura Thompson, Sylantro’s marketing vice president. “It’s definitely well beyond IP trunking to these high-value kinds of applications where you’re literally able to offer not only the PBX features but well beyond that with some of the services that we provide.”