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| Richard Bligh |
Gamma Telecom’s Assured Access Service heralds in a new era of VoIP access availability for the channel.
When it comes to VoIP Gamma Telecom sees itself as being different to other companies as Marketing Director Richard Bligh explains.
“Compared to companies such as VanillaIP and HipCom who supply telephony software, with the Assured Access Service Gamma has gone the whole nine yards to produce a guaranteed end-to-end service.
“The Assured Service is available across our entire spectrum of VoIP products – Communicator, IP DirectConnect and Featureplus and delivers a service availability guarantee, voice channel guarantee, a high specification router and a guaranteed fix time. No other company, as far as we can see, offers this level of service for VoIP.”
Gamma can still supply their three VoIP products with reseller independent
access, for example, if the reseller uses Griffin, Murphx or Tiscali as their ISP, Gamma can still supply Business Quality Voice Services, but only the Gamma Assured IP Service is 100% Gamma managed from end to end.
“Resellers want total confidence in VoIP services before they start selling them and AIS gets them up and running with the assurances they need. Assured Access will attract many resellers who are ‘turned on’ by its specification as they can say. ‘Right, I know what I am getting now and therefore I know exactly what I am selling.’
“What this means is that some end users, who until now would not go near SIP trunks because SIP did not have the same SLA’s as ISDN, will now come into the market. The Assured Access product from Gamma answers the question, ‘That’s OK guys but what happens when it falls over?’.”
Assured Access is made up from all the key elements that are needed for an assured VoIP service.
“We supply a Cisco 857 router, 24x7 support, 99.95% availability and a guaranteed time to fix as opposed to time to respond. Our SLAs are derived from our suppliers own guarantees which means that we can supply a comprehensive range of access solutions that fit within the Gamma SLA wherever you are in the UK. Whilst ISDN has a response time of four hours it has become a myth that ISDN is ever fixed inside that time.
“We also guarantee the number of voice channels that are available. If we say that you can make 10 voice calls then that is what you will get.”
How can Gamma Telecom guarantee the call quality with Assured Access?
“Our latency, jitter and packet loss figures and performance are at industry leading levels and believe the introduction of Assured Access represents the next generation of VoIP. We are putting services on the table for the channel and saying ‘That is what they will do’.
“There are two version of Assured Access; Assured 5 and Assured 10 which provide five and ten voice channels respectively. Richard Bligh believes this in itself opens up new markets for reseller.
“Finding a cost effective VoIP solution, especially one such as Assured Access with all its service guarantees, has not been easy for channel partners. Assured Access will now enable them to sell VoIP with confidence into their smaller customers. The Cisco 857 router is positioned for quality and our VoIP products are faster and cheaper than ISDN to provision.
“An on-line reporting tool is available for resellers which will show exactly how their product is performing over any given period. In turn, resellers can show this to their customers should they need to demonstrate the reliability of the service. Assured Access is a very serious product that will change reseller perception of VoIP.”
Ed Says
This is quite a ballsy offering from Gamma Telecom who will launch the product at the Convergence Summit, Sandown Park, Esher this month. Assured Access will suit a number of different resellers. For example, resellers who themselves offer SLA’s to their own customers and sell on value rather than price (although I must point out that Gamma’s pricing is not exactly at a premium for what they are offering). Additionally, and this is important to so many resellers, it is a complete solution from end-to-end which means reseller has just one throat to choke if anything becomes a problem.