connection device and gateway, so you can pretty much ignore them. They also install and maintain the dedicated broadband connection, which is dedicated to your company’s phone calls and thus circumvents network congestion.
For more than ten years, the SMB market has been the ‘apple in the eye’ of communications vendors and service providers. At Broadview Networks ( www.broadviewnet.com), Rob Marschall, Managing Director of Data Product Management, says: “Our Broadspeed Office Suite is a hosted PBX solution. The software is provided by Natural Convergence from Ottawa, Canada, and the hardware consists of Mitel 5200 series of IP phone sets. We’re targeting specifically businesses in the LATA 132, which is the downstate New York market including all five boroughs of New York, Westchester Country and all of Long Island. We’re targeting a wide variety of customers from a size perspective, although the small and middle sized customers seem to be most ready to take on this type of hosted PBX service right now. They don’t have a lot of in-house IT capabilities and therefore are looking for a single vendor to provide their Internet access services, private data services, IP phones services, etc.”
Broadview’s CTO/CIO Ken Shulman, says, “Traditionally, larger customers would own their own hardware, but what’s interesting is that larger customers who have lots of locations seem to be very interested in hosted solutions because the solution sits inside a network cloud and provides a lot of disaster recovery and redundancy and diversity protections for
the multi-location customer. It’s reminiscent of, but is much more than a VPN, because the logic sits inside the network cloud as well as the network itself.”
Also in the New York area, M5 ( www.m5net.com) recently extended its hosted VoIP offering to support New York-based companies having offices situated throughout the US. An early customer of this IP Telephony service extension is Prince Minerals,
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