The Ultimate VoIP Communications Platform Built With Telinta & Commio

Tim McLain

Whether you’re setting up a new VoIP service provider business or looking to upgrade your services, you need a cloud softswitch and multi-carrier routing to minimize your cost of goods, eliminate outages, and save money on every call.

Together, Telinta and Commio (formerly thinQ) deliver on the promise of a modern cloud communications platform (CPaaS). During this joint webinar, VoIP experts from both companies explained that every VoIP service provider needs integrated switching and billing, plus high-quality VoIP termination and origination.

Telinta offers cloud-based switching and billing solutions to VoIP service providers around the world, and the company’s ecosystem of industry-leading partners helped VoIP service providers like you grow their businesses with high-quality voice termination and origination plus other services.

When you add Commio to Telinta, you can reach customers every time and take control of your voice carriers and routing. Commio’s VoIP termination services are unique since partners can select their own underlying carriers, 45 and counting, and have real-time access and control over their call routing for maximum savings and disaster recovery to avoid outages.

In addition to our high-quality VoIP termination in the U.S. and Canada, we also provide a global A to Z VoIP termination. Best of all, new partners to Commio and Telinta can enjoy 1,000 free voice minutes from thinQ plus get a $400 dollar credit for Telinta services.

Start with Telinta

Anthony Stiso, Telinta: I’m here to present a little bit about hosted switching and billing solutions for voice service providers from Telinta.

Telinta was founded in 2002 and we’re one of the companies that pioneered the concept of a hosted soft switch; putting a soft switch in the cloud so that hundreds of VoIP service providers and their resellers around the world can access a full portfolio of VoIP solutions without owning their own hardware or software.

We call our platform TeliCore, it brings together fully integrated switching and billing, which is very important. Together with some of our own custom development. Over the years we’ve worked with VoIP service providers, we’ve understood their needs and we’ve actually developed solutions that you won’t find anywhere else in the marketplace.

And we mentioned earlier, we’ve put together an industry-leading ecosystem of partners because we realize that it takes several companies to work together in order for your VoIP business to succeed. Our platform is the industry’s largest hosted soft switch of its type anywhere in the world.

Our main facilities are hosted in the New York area and we have additional facilities across the United States, and in key international markets around the world. Our business model is very simple. We sell to VoIP service providers and only to VoIP service providers. We don’t sell directly to end users or to enterprise customers, but instead we enable you to sell to those customers.

Everything we do is white label. So, your customers or your resellers will never see the Telinta brand or domain name or logo anywhere in our solutions. Everything we do is brand-able by you and your resellers.

Add thinQ to Telinta to Power your CPaaS

We also are unique because we enable you to use any VoIP termination carriers or (phone number) DID providers you’d like. For example thinQ is an example of that partnership. On our platform we enable our customers to use the provider of their choice and get the best pricing powered by machine learning. You can also use other service providers like companies who provide solutions for telecom taxation. If you’re in the United States you may need E911 services. You can use SMS providers for billing notifications and password resets and other things.

At Telinta, we provide you with comprehensive training so that when you sign up to become a Telinta customer, one of our senior engineers will reach out to you to schedule sessions of training. We do this through desktop sharing, so you actually can see the platform and we guide you through the key configurations you need to make. And this is hands-on training, so at the end of the training you’re actually able to configure your own switching environment. And then after training we provide 24/7 live technical support every day of the year. So there’s always engineers on staff to help you with questions.

Our platform is the place where all of your different service providers are integrated together. So, on our platform you can easily add your termination providers, you can add your own DID providers, for example thinQ provides both termination and DIDs.

We have APIs to several leading DID providers, and we just recently announced an API that lets you access your origination account with thinQ directly from our platform.

This is very advantageous because it lets you easily integrate DIDs, local phone numbers. For the services that you offer things like hosted PBX, calling card business and residential phone service, mobile services, you can sell thinQ DIDs on a wholesale basis, you can even have your end users choose their own phone number through a self-service portal.

So, this API really provides a lot of advantages. We have for your end users so that they can log in via a self-service portal, and do things like make a payment, or control their call forwarding, or use Paypal to make a payment. And they can see Call Detail Records (CDRs) in real-time and a variety of other self-service functions. And again all these portals are extremely customizable and brand-able by you and your resellers.

Your resellers are VoIP service providers in their own right. They’re running their own business they’re setting their own prices, marketing under their own brand, and they purchase services directly from you. We don’t come into contact with your resellers, they don’t see Telinta anywhere in the solutions. So, they’re your customers.

We provide support for a variety of other functions as well. For example, if you need to use IP phones, we have a unique provisioning profile solution that lets you automatically provision any number of IP phones. We’ll talk more about that later. We have APIs to mobile top-up providers that lets you sell prepaid airtime to mobile phones virtually anywhere in the world. We have a solution that lets you provide MVNO services for global roaming to travelers and also a brand-able mobile smart phone that you can offer on a standalone basis or integrated with one of the other solutions. So, it’s a very robust environment.

With a single relationship with Telinta, you have access to a full portfolio of VoIP solutions. Popular services like calling-card, PIN-less, mobile services hosted PBX, and a variety of other things all on one platform.

Even in disasters like Hurricane Sandy, or the New York City blackout, or just recently Hurricane Irma, we experienced zero downtime.

Let’s take a look at the hosted PBX solution, we offer things like dial by name directory, call groups and call cues, voicemail to email, fax to email, customizable music on hold, customizable IVR, auto-attendance which is a virtual receptionist.

Business customers love this where callers are greeted by a menu; Press one for sales, press 2 for support. They let small companies look big, and big companies function better.

Most interesting is the IP phone provisioning that I discussed earlier. At Telinta, we’ve developed auto-provisioning profiles for many many popular IP phones and other devices, so that we already have put together some of the configuration parameters so that you don’t have to do it manually. You log in to an easy online portal, create your inventories of phones by entering the MAC address and other account details.

Some of the devices that you can easily provision, basic or feature-rich IP phones, video capable IP phones, cordless IP phones. If end user customers don’t want to use IP phones we can help you provision analogue telephone adapters, APA devices, so that they can use analog phones, and even things like door units, and paging speakers and PA systems that businesses look to their telecom provider to setup and operate.

When the device is plugged into an IP network, just plug in and either net cable at the customer prem, it automatically reaches out to our platform and downloads a complete configuration profile. So the end result is fast, error-free automated configurations of IP devices without the need for manual configuration. This means you don’t even need to send an installer to the customer’s prem. We talk about using these profiles for provisioning, but you can also use them to update firmware or to activate or deactivate features.

So Telinta is an extremely useful cloud-based tool and there’s no additional charge for this, it’s a standard part of our platform. If you would like to use a model that we don’t have a profile for, we’d love to take a look at it, and in most cases we can develop a profile for you.

Some of the things you get with Telinta, as I mentioned, the customizable portals. There’s a unique set of portals for your resellers, for distributors, for individual agents who process transactions. Your end users can do a wide variety of things.

For example, our online sign up capability is extremely popular. This lets your customer sign up online. He can do things like configure hosted PBX extensions, setup payments, adjust his call routing, choose his own phone number. There’s a wide variety of things that your end users can do online. If you’re interested more we’d love to show you our virtual office solution, which really is an impressive solution for self-service portals.

As I mentioned, everything is brandable and you can do business in any language you need. You can do business in any currency you need. You can easily accept online payments with credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, and even cash. Our billing system is extremely flexible. As I mentioned, it’s real-time billing: This enables you to provide both prepaid or postpaid services if you’d like.

You’re in control of your own pricing, your billing, you create your own discount plans, promotions, subscriptions, and you can do all of this with our platform, completely integrated with the switching on the services that you provide.

Another example of integration is, you have access to a full portfolio of services that all come from the same platform. So you can do things like create your own service bundles, you can add a mobile phone as a mobile extension to a hosted PBX service if you’d like. You can create different bundles, and promotions, and packages, and lots of other things.

Most of what I talked about today is technology, but we understand that running a successful VoIP business is more than technology. It’s people; people who can train you and pass on the experience and the knowledge they’ve gathered over the years to help you get started. People who can support you 24/7 around the clock every day of the year, and people who can develop custom solutions that help meet the unique needs of your business. And this is something that we really excel in. And you can meet some of those people at major telecom events.

Add The Power of Commio

Eric Leon, Commio: Thank you, Anthony. One of the things I’ve always been so impressed with when I look at Telinta, is just how comprehensive the solution is. You know, it really covers all the bases. There are other players in the marketplace, but I just really don’t know of anybody else who’s really covering every aspect of it. The other thing that I always appreciate that you guys do, is always to me a real key indicator of how professional and how successful you guys have been is, because you guys are always developing new things.

I’m going to get into what Commio (formerly thinQ) does, giving you a high-level overview of exactly what thinQ does, and who we are as a company. And one of the reasons why you might want to watch this is because we are doing things very different in the space, in the voice space.

We’ve won a lot of awards, especially over the past few years for things that we’ve done that have been breakthrough technologies. One of the things that I like to talk about outside of just who thinQ is and what the product is, I want to talk about industry hurdles. Things that you might encounter on day one, year one, year two, three, four, and so on and so forth. I’ll talk about how you can improve your cost structure and quality. Of course, that’s going to bring me to showing you the thinQ platform and how we begin to address some of those industry hurdles and some of the things that I’ve talked about here.

thinQ started in 2009. We separated from a very large telecommunications company. We did that to do things in a very different way in the cloud. We focus all of our efforts on voice and messaging services. And this can be, for VoIP providers, enterprise, contact centers, carriers. We built an integrated third-party API so you can get all feel all things covered such as voice, SMS/MMS, and traditional database services.

And that brings me to one segment that we want to talk about here today, specifically as it ties into Telinta and that is the question: What about voice?

Let’s talk about this as part of a customer journey. As you’re out there and you’re shopping in the marketplace and you land on Telinta and we found a rock-solid solution for your hosted solution, whatever it might be that you’re procuring through them.

You’re now left with going out there and figuring out the voice aspect of it. How am I actually going to get these calls completed, both inbound and outbound?

You’ve got all the mechanics, you’re all setup. You’ve got the best foundation you can possibly do. But you quickly find out one unfortunate part about the industry and that is, there is no single carrier that you can connect to that is good all the time, or is good everywhere.

So what do I mean by that? Well, you might go on with a provider and they might be excellent, for the U.S. traffic. But they might be less than stellar between the U.S. and Malaysia, right.

You might find somebody who’s excellent for a particular traffic pattern that you’re sending across them. You might be hitting a few states or a few countries. But they’re not so good in other areas.

It is asking a lot from a single provider to be the complete and total solution.

So, let’s look at that from a customer journey perspective. You usually start out at Stage 1, and I’m talking to Telinta, right. You’ve now got your platform, and the first thing that you do is you make that first compromise, you go out there and you find the best provider you can get with the amount of usage that you’re doing at that point in time.

So at stage one, we would see that they’ve got their first voice provider and hopes are high. But over time they find that that provider might not be a total and complete solution. So they start thinking about redundancy, if they’re thinking, “I can’t just have one. I’m going to need more than one.” So now they’re back out into the market, and they’re shopping for their next provider, and they’re focused on building a more high-quality network for their calls.

Then they start thinking about the idea availability. So they start saying, you know I’ve got a provider and they give me a lot of great numbers, but I run into issues where they don’t have numbers and locations that I want, or potentially they don’t have the right price point I need to compete in the marketplace that I’m in right now.

So they begin looking again at providers based on that information. Then, as they continually progressed along they say, I’ve got a lot of providers, but do I have all the mechanisms I need to begin to use them in competition with one another?

So they begin at looking at various least cost routing technologies, maybe they have some of it existing, but maybe they want to advance that to the next level.

Inevitably, they sort of end up at this last stage where they’re wondering, “Was all of this worth the effort?” Adding personnel, carrier manages, contract negotiations, dealing with turning carriers up and turning them back down because they don’t perform over time, so forth.

At the end of the day we see that a lot of customer share with us that I’m customer-facing. I like to focus on my resellers, on my VoIP providers. I like to focus on the product lines that I’m building for them. I like to be out there selling and marketing. I don’t necessarily want to spend all of my time and finances on driving the carriers upstream.

That brings us to the thinQ plus Telinta solution. 

Let’s say you’ve connected to a carrier, and then it goes from the carrier to the destination that you’re completing both inbound and outbound from and it feels like a good solution at first. That’s where we come into play. A new kind of voice. thinQ leapfrogs you to the end of that process. We want to take all the heavy lifting off of you and enhance the network. And we do that from day one.

When you come onto our platform for thinQ, there’s no required usage, spend or anything associated with that.

I’m going to show you how you can manage direct connections to more than 45 voice providers, both domestically and internationally. All built right into the platform, no need to go out and negotiate contracts, or do agreements with each individual provider. Of course, you can order numbers (DIDs) directly inside of the Telinta platform, so we’ve got API integration that will make that processes easy.

But all of this comes under one roof, right.

Now all of a sudden you’ve got the thinQ platform, you’ve got all 45 carriers, but we simplify the process. One bill. One support team. Telinta connects to the carrier and then it connects on to our destination. In this platform now, we connect to the thinQ cloud, no hardware, nothing like has to be installed. It’s quick and easy to add thinQ to Telinta, and you’re up and running with the ultimate communications platform in the cloud (CPaaS).

We instantaneously have access to every quality North American and international provider in the marketplace. Now all of the sudden you get direct access to these providers as if you had gone out there and negotiated the contract all on your own.

So, what’s the advantage of having multiple providers? Well, a lot of people are price conscious, so let’s get to that one first. You can turn on up to 45 carriers on a single screen. So, how is that actually going to perform for them?

When you directly connect to all these providers our system has the capability to cross-compare each provider on a call by call basis and that can be as granular as in you’re calling Lower Manhattan and AT&T offers you a 40 percent cost advantage over every other carrier. So that cost saving is passed directly onto you as our partner.

We complete the call with AT&T and you achieve that 40 percent cost saving. Our least cost routing technology is always picking the most optimal route per destination right inside Telinta.

This also gives us the capability of doing what’s called fail-over. So, a lot of you are probably already familiar with this concept, but let me just give you a general idea of what it means. This means that in this case I’ve got 40 providers enabled. So that means that for every destination I call, I’ve got 40 layers of redundancy. So if AT&T for some reason can’t complete a call, our system seamlessly switches to the next provider and the caller is never the wiser.

This can ensure that you get that 99.99 percent call completion rate with thinQ. The idea in our platform is with our 45 providers, if we can’t get that call completed, I don’t know who can get that call completed. It utilizes dynamic fail-over.

So every time it tests the location and sees that the carriers down, it’s automatically and seamlessly reprovisioning it over to the new provider. It’s simple in nature, but in execution it’s excellent.

So essentially what our platform allows you to do is, you get a multi-carrier network with no contracts or obligations towards any individual provider. No need to call them for support or anything like that. All tier 1 carriers across our platform. You get an automated savings platform, a LCR (least cost routing) engine. thinQ is essentially always routing to the most optimal carrier based on who you’ve selected. So now all of a sudden you get this 40% to 70% cost saving over any carrier you talk to in the marketplace, and makes sense to save on your cost of goods (COGs).

How can one provider compare against the best of 45? Disaster recovery, we can easily reroute from a failing route directly over to a route that is successful. And this translates to almost every product we have. At thinQ, we pioneered routing technology for the toll-free space. We are the only provider who can give you fail-over on toll-free inbound voice calls. And that is completely controllable in a least-cost-routing engine in the cloud. All these services are free of charge, it’s a pure consumption-based model. So if you use a minute you pay for a minute, if you don’t, you don’t pay for it. And we back all this up with our live 24/7 support.

To get started with Telinta and Commio, get a demo today.

Date posted: December 20, 2020

Topic: CPaaS   Intelligent Call Routing   Outbound Voice   Voice API  

Tags: E911   Least Cost Routing   VoIP  

Tim McLain

A passionate technologist at heart with more than 25 years of marketing experience, Tim loves using technology to help businesses solve problems and grow their bottom line. Tim is happiest brainstorming new approaches to marketing and communications to help Commio's partners better understand, trust, and embrace our cloud communications solutions. In his spare time, he loves shooting and editing video, riding long distances on North Carolina’s amazing bike trails, and enjoying the darkest craft beer he can find.

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