I had a chance to meet last week with Voxalot honchos Tony Mascarenhas and Martin Burns. Located in Sydney Australia, Voxalot is a company with a ton of offerings in the VoIP space. The basic premise is that they will provide a core suite of telephony services at a reasonable price, without providing PSTN interconnections. You, as the user, assemble the suite of services you want a la carte, and save tons of money in the process.
Last week they announced the VoxConnect API. With this API, businesses can connect web sites and other services into a telephony engine that will allow them to create calling applications to power business processes. With their global interconnection network, Voxalot can now offer these calling services anywhere in the world.
Voxalot also benefits from its sister company SIPBroker, which maintains a database of 2000 SIP interconnection points globally. Using SIPBroker, you can simply dial into one of the many local access numbers they maintain, dial the network identification code for the SIP network you wish (for instance, SIPPhone is *747) and then dial the number on the target network.
What I like about this model is that it starts with SIP. The PSTN is an afterthought.
Voxalot isn't a new idea. Others, like Luca Filigheddu's AbbeyPhone in Italy, have tried this before. Perhaps, however, the timing is finally right for this kind of radical step.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
