Zoom's wholesale offering gives service providers access to a fully branded version of the company's Global Village VoIP service.

by Jeff Goldman [April 25, 2007]

Zoom Technologies was founded back in 1977—Terry Manning, who is Zoom's vice president of sales and marketing as well as the brother of company president and CEO Frank Manning, jokes that the reason for the company's founding was "because my brother had just graduated from the doctoral program at MIT and was looking for something to do."

From the beginning, Zoom has been focused on designing, producing, and marketing telecommunications products. The bulk of the company's revenues have come from dial-up modems, though Zoom also offers DSL modems, cable modems, wireless networking products, Bluetooth products—and VoIP, both in the form of VoIP hardware and in the Global Village VoIP service.

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Manning says the VoIP service followed the VoIP hardware, specifically because two of the company's biggest channels are ISPs and the retail channel. "In both of those channels, we saw the service element as a problem, because the hardware is not very useful in the world of dynamic IP addresses if you don't have a service to make that translation," he says.

And so, according to Dean Panagopoulos, vice president of Zoom's network products group, Global Village was launched in July of 2004 in order to make it easier for end users to set up and use VoIP. "We came to the conclusion that to make a really good VoIP experience for our end customers, we wanted to control both ends of the process—the hardware that was the put at the home, and the service," he says.

The wholesale offering
VoIP ASAP, Zoom's wholesale offering, was a logical next step. "What we found was that, sure, the big guys knew what they were doing, but a number of the smaller people wanted to get into the internet telephony business but didn't have the expertise to do the relationship between the PSTN carriers, setting up their softswitch, that type of thing," Panagopoulos says.

The idea, Panagopoulos says, was to give service providers access to a fully branded version of the Global Village VoIP service, with Zoom continuing to run the back end for them. "We would continue to be the PSTN connectivity, we would run the SIP servers, the media servers and all of that—but they could offer it as their own branded product," he says.

And the service provider continues to own the customer—they can always migrate that customer to their own servers if they choose to do so. "It was never intended to be everything for everybody," Panagopoulos says. "It was intended to be a nice entry for somebody, and if they got big enough to put all their own resources to bear, then great, good for them—we're happy to keep selling them hardware!"

With that in mind, although the VoIP ASAP service has a $2,000 setup fee, that fee is offset by a $10-per-item rebate program on Zoom's VoIP hardware. "It's a $2,000 cost to set up the service, but that's rebated to a service provider by buying 200 endpoints from us, whether they be a gateway with VoIP, or a telephone adapter," Manning says. "If they buy 200 of those, then, effectively, it's free to set up with VoIP ASAP."

Software, CALEA, and 911
The ISP, Manning says, is free to use any pricing plan they like. While he says Zoom's wholesale pricing under the VoIP ASAP program is competitive, Manning contends it's really the ease of use of Zoom's offering that makes it stand out. "We try our hardest to make it very easy for somebody to set it up, and then provide great support for them as they're doing it," he says.

Zoom's software gives each end user a complete view of everything from call records to fees—and the service provider gets a similar online overview of all users as well as weekly or monthly activity reports, whichever they prefer. "So the ISP basically gets complete control—they see all aspects of their customers—and that's all provided through a web-based utility," Panagopoulos says.

Manning says Zoom has its own systems in place to comply with a CALEA order if necessary, as well as a distinctive approach to 911 service. "Our hardware actually has the ability to determine that there is a PSTN line attached, and then it routes all emergency calling to that PSTN—as opposed to using a service, which will typically cost about a buck a month," he says.

That does, of course, assume that the end user is either on DSL or has an extra phone line—but Panagopoulos says that's often true of new VoIP users. "A lot of people are wary about migrating their phone number to a VoIP service," he says. "This lets them keep the best of both worlds until they're very comfortable."

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