Challenge

Telehop is Canada’s leading provider of international and local long distance calling plans. With a strong foothold and large customer base in the telecommunications space, Telehop was looking to expand their capabilities and offer new services to their customers. Telehop has a developed a framework to help facilitate the delivery of a VoIP-based PSTN service to their internet-based clients. Telehop looked to iConverged LLC. for a SIP-based VoIP telephony engine to serve as the central component of the solution. This product should also be poised to form the voice component of what will become Telehop’s integrated voice, video and network product.

Solution

iConverged LLC. first determined that the goal of the project was to allow Telehop to offer a VoIP-based service which will eventually form part of a suite of communication products delivering voice, video and networking in a single service. It was agreed that the most successful approach would be to break the solution into various phases and roll out from a position of success. Phase One delivered a basic VoIP service to the marketplace that offers capabilities similar to that offered on a residential PSTN circuit. Future phases will introduce advanced features and services, and thus it is critical that the core platform is inherently able to evolve with the industry. The heart of the product will be a SIP-based VoIP telephone service. The client will have the option of using a Telehop-branded version of softphones and an ATA from Linksys or equivalent. The client will sign up to the service via a website, and be assigned a DID in the NPA of their choice.

Benefits

The core systems will be based on open source software. The benefits of this arrangement include: shorter time to market, low cost of entry, increased flexibility, and less complex and costly licensing. Telehop will now be able to expand their residential offering to provide home phone service and ultimately increase revenues. This highly scalable and flexible solution can continue to evolve and move forward in the marketplace while strategically adding new features and functions, giving them a competitive advantage. The solution will be mirrored onto another platform to provide Telehop with a redundant and reliable solution. The software based solution provides flexibility to Telehop as they are no longer tied to proprietary hardware and artificially imposed software limits.