VON: Voxbone takes virtual numbers global

BOSTON--A relatively unknown Belgian company, Voxbone, is making waves at VON with a specialized wholesale service that offers local phone numbers in 50 different countries in Asia, Europe, North America and South America.

The idea is for service providers to offer these local numbers to companies that want to operate globally by enabling customers to reach them via a local phone call.

“If you are a company in Hong Kong, but you want to do business in New York, you can put a New York phone number on your Web site,” said Rodrigue Ullens de Schooten, co-founder and CEO of Voxbone. “And you are not dependent on the local phone company--the number follows you when you move.”

The four-year-old Voxbone operates a VoIP backbone and charges a flat rate for the service. This week it also announced a new worldwide trunk service, Worldwide VoIP Trunk, a service that enables call centers, service providers, businesses and others to obtain local phone numbers and share the capacity for all these numbers using one common trunk. The price of the service is based on the volume of calls the call center or other operation wants to be able to receive on a given number, Ullens said.

“We are interconnected with all the local carriers,” he said. “The customer pays for dedicated capacity.”

The service replaces the costly and time-consuming process of ordering T-1 lines in every location and enables bandwidth sharing among locations for greater efficiency. Voxbone has been offering the service for about four months, Ullens said, but just announced it formally this week at VON.

Voxbone remains small--about 12 people--and privately funded. The company has a fully automated Web-based ordering and reconfiguring service, which allows customers to add services or make changes on the fly, he said.

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