"We have seen a dramatic influx of resellers wanting to adopt hosted telephony into their portfolio as their customers begin to recognise the benefits and opportunities and have therefore witnessed a significant increase in the amount of voice we’re carrying across our network. At any given time, we are carrying around 400Mbit/s of voice and that’s increased threefold over the last couple of years. Ultimately, these developments are as a result of the notable advances we’ve seen in connectivity for hosted voice.
“The rate in which the quality of service has progressed means it is now much easier to transmit quality-assured voice over anything as basic as broadband connections with the right management. This is intensified by the fact that, beyond broadband, we are now seeing products, such as EFM, that are a genuine alternative to your ISDN30 installs from BT and with the right SLA. For this reason, from a provider’s point of view, it’s very important that resellers now look at how they can adopt hosted telephony inside their business, as their traditional calls, lines and phone system business is undoubtedly at risk.
“However, I think there are still some questions in the industry at the moment about whether hosted telephony works for large scale deployments as well as the relatively small and distributed installations. In these instances, it can still be difficult when commercially comparing PBX with hosted telephony as the per seat pricing model can quickly price itself out of the game at scale.
“When selling hosted PBX services, the key is to concentrate on the features and functionality it provides. This can mean focussing on the functionality of the most expensive PBX available to you in a flexible model, especially when you’re pitching to smaller and even mid-market businesses.
“We have been able to demonstrate numerous success stories involving resellers who are already successfully delivering these solutions, using Daisy Wholesale connectivity. This success is not only a result of a desire in the customer base to adopt these solutions, but the advances in technology which allow us to deliver voice in a quality assured fashion. Ultimately, it is an aggregators’ responsibility to provide the technology and foundations behind hosted telephony, which resellers can then build upon.”