Just picked this up on Electric News today. An English company called Colt Telecom are offering irish businesses all local, national and international calls within a select number of countries for a flat rate, per-user, per-month fee of EUR24.50. Other countries covered in the deal include Austria, Belgium, France, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.
However, the monthly charge does not cover calls to mobile phones. Having just read the VoIP open access directions from Comreg I'm not surprised as the call tariffs & STRPL (Switched Transit Routing Price List) for voice to mobile are likely to be at mobile-to-fixed rates for VoIP calls so as not to penalise the impoverished mobile operators, who've got to make a buck too, ya know.
It looks like Colt will be using IP-Centrex for switching and customers will lease phones at a flat rate of 20 euro/month. Nice idea as it reduces business CAPEX cost considerably while capturing a market for Colt. It appears that carrier-grade SIP-based Siemens HiPath 8000 softswitche(s) will form the switching backplane of the service and there are plans to introduce some unified messaging offerings which integrate with MS outlook. Not sure if a webservice only offering will be available to those that don't run windows.
Colt, which employs around 40 people in Ireland specialises in providing data, voice and managed services to midsize and major businesses and wholesale customers. It has more than 50,000 customers across all industry sectors and the company owns and operates a 13-country, 20,000km network that includes metropolitan area networks in 32 major European cities, with direct fibre connections into 10,000 buildings and 12 Colt data centres.
Thanks to mofoghlu for the link.