Voxbone introduced its new browser-based configuration tools that give its clients more self-sufficiency, flexibility and control over their use of DID services. These tools allow carriers to make many cost-vs-voice-quality tradeoffs previously made for them. They also enable customers to save money while ensuring call completion through pooled trunking capacity, redundancy and load balancing.

As implemented by Voxbone, these Web provisioning tools allow carriers and big enterprise customers to configure and manage their own network usage, if desired, in several ways, and for each number owned:

• by defining and choosing a SIP end point to which the calls should be delivered;
• by defining and choosing a backup SIP end point that would activate automatically in case the customer's primary equipment was unavailable;
• by selecting the preferred codec—the biggest determinant of bandwidth requirement and voice quality;
• by routing the incoming voice traffic via any of Voxbone’s five aggregating SuperPOPs and choosing how far calls are routed over Voxbone's network as opposed to the public Internet;
• by choosing the caller ID formats (e164 or other formats);
• by enabling DNS SRV load balancing so that traffic is distributed among various IP addresses defined on the customer side.

Information preserved across the VoIP-PSTN divide

Voxbone captures and transmits important call information as it routes the call, enabling callers to interact with telecom applications and services running on other continents. Here again, the customer decides:

• by choosing the way in which DTMF (touch tones) are recognized, to accommodate different end-user equipment;
• by activating DNIS support. Voxbone relays the dialed number to the terminating switch—information needed for direct extension dialing;
• by accepting or rejecting certain call origins. Customers may, for example, want their U.S. toll-free numbers to accept landline calls but to reject those made on pay phones, in order to escape the high setup fees on those calls.

The economies of aggregation

Incoming traffic from several regions is aggregated by Voxbone before being relayed to the customer’s IP switch or gateway. This enables customers to share capacity across all (or many) numbers, as well as across many countries, time zones and fluctuations in traffic. There is no need to lease separate trunks, for example, for Australian and British incoming traffic; a customer can lease one global trunk from Voxbone and pool capacity across calling-card and conferencing applications in the U.K. and call centers in Sydney and Melbourne.