Service providers who want to offer voice-only business services to replace ISDN need look no further as Telstra Wholesale brings Business Voice IP - Voice Only Resale to market. We spoke to Josef Kiss, Telstra Wholesale Business Voice Product Manager to find out more.

Six months after Telstra Wholesale launched Business Voice, the first upgrade to the solution is here in the form of Voice Only Resale (VOR). “We launched Telstra Wholesale Business Voice in March 2018 as a minimum viable product. It was always our aim to enhance the solution as we received feedback from our customers about what they need from business-grade voice-over-IP services,” Josef said. “One of the first things on our list was to address the requirements of customers who want to sell voice services without data services bundled together.”

The first iteration of Telstra Wholesale Business Voice used the nbnTM data network for access and to provide the IP addresses for the voice element. This required customers to set up their own nbn aggregation network. For customers that had no intention of selling data services, creating and running the aggregation network added a significant burden.

“We quickly identified this as an area where we could help customers reduce costs and get more value from their business voice services,” Josef said. “And it wasn’t just affecting smaller companies. We spoke to customers of all sizes and realised that medium and larger sized businesses would benefit if we could come up with a way to remove the need for them to have an aggregation network for voice only services.”


Finding the right solution

Using an agile product development methodology, Josef and his team workshopped a number of potential approaches before settling on the Business Voice IP VOR solution. With Business Voice IP VOR, Telstra Wholesale sources IP addresses from its own pool so that customers don’t have to use an nbn aggregation network. Telstra Wholesale will trigger the underlying nbn service and provide the TC-2 accesses for customers’ voice traffic.

“Of the two most viable options, this approach was much faster and more efficient to implement. Rather than spending a year in development, we could stand this up in a few months and get it to our customers quickly,” Josef said. “It’s a testament to agile working and demonstrates that thinking creatively about the problem will deliver the best result.”

“With a relatively fast, simple fix, our voice only customers will save considerable time and resources from not having to manage an unnecessary aggregation network,” Josef added.


Delivering continual improvement

Voice Only Resale is just the first of several planned enhancements to the Business Voice IP service.  “We are working on a second iteration for access-agnostic business voice services so customers can choose exactly how they want to set up their voice services. There are many other things on our roadmap and, as we have shown with VOR, if there is something our customers need, we will listen and address their needs as quickly as possible,” Josef said.


Commitment-free onboarding

Telstra Wholesale Business Voice IP is an ideal replacement for ISDN services being progressively disconnected from 30 September 2019* as the nbn network rolls out. And customers can prepare for the disconnection of ISDN by onboarding to Business Voice IP now with no commitment.

“Onboarding with Telstra for Business Voice IP doesn’t commit you to acquire Business Voice IP services from Telstra. But it does get a lot of the preparatory work out of the way, so that if you decide to choose Business Voice IP as a replacement for your end users’ ISDN services, we can migrate your services sooner.” Josef said. “Then you are in a position to migrate services when you are ready and ensure your end customers get the best experience of moving from ISDN to our replacement Business Voice IP service.”

*FTTP / FTTB / FTTN premises only. Final national exit date anticipated to be in 2022.