“In 2007, SpiriTel launched a fully operational, resilient, regulated Hosted IP telephony service. As well as ensuring the service was an effective PSTN replacement for its business base, rigorous PATS compliancy checks had to be undertaken. There are plenty of pitfalls that a new player into this market can fall into, but these can be minimised.
By taking full ownership for all hosted solutions, SpiriTel has been able to engineer the whole network from handset or WiFi point to one of its datacentres. This has provided SpiriTel with full visibility of all connectivity. As a result we can take a pro-active view in ensuring a high service level.”
Shanmuganathan says SpiriTel were fortunate to have most of its porting partners already connected to its multi switch carrier grade network prior to entering the hosted market. This enabled them to easily set up the required porting agreements.
“The result of this was that we were able to quickly grow customer numbers in this sector. A large number of hospitality based customers quickly realised the benefits of an estate wide hosted telephony implementation. Over the last twelve months SpiriTel has gained a reputation for winning large hosted telephony solutions, deploying the two largest hosted Mitel 3600 customer installations in Europe to date.
Our biggest commerical challenge to date has been to persuade resellers and dealers to move away from the traditional ‘selling tin’ approach where they would generate higher revenue in the short term but lose out in the long term to put more emphasis on hosted telephony solutions. However, as businesses continue to look to cut costs, and with the growing requirement to support homeworker increase, this will change.”