With Ericsson’s new VoIP Business Gateways, operators can offer SMEs integrated IP multimedia services, including business grade VoIP, as a managed service – all from a single box on the user’s premises.

Product Marketing Manager Fredrik Medin says: “This solution will be somewhat of a prolonged arm for the operators. Operators will be able to place a gateway on their customer’s premises and the end user can connect all their IP telephones, softphones, POTS, faxes and laptops to it.”

SMEs currently have access to IP services but need separate systems. They have had to keep and combine, for example, their access routers, Ethernet switches and firewalls; triggering increased costs and forcing them to spend more time managing complex equipment.

“But these are all-in-one-boxes,” Medin says. “The whole solution is contained in them, with one management system. It makes it a simple and cost-effective solution for operators to roll out to SMEs.”

Enterprise users can simply buy the latest IP-based voice, data and multimedia communications as a service from the operator, minimizing CAPEX and avoiding the need to manage technical complexity. They will have one single point of contact, and a single invoice, for all legacy and IP-based services. 

Operators benefit by not only protecting their existing revenue streams, but also by getting a whole new business opportunity. Through this solution, operators strengthen their IMS Multimedia Telephony (IMT) proposition, (Ericsson’s IMS solution for IP and multimedia telephony), making it easy for them to deploy new services and so enhance revenue.

Product Manager Stefan Möller says: “Also, the VoIP Business Gateways support voice and data quality monitoring, so it enables Service Level Agreements between the service provider and the enterprise. Operators will be in control of security and quality; they take ownership of the enterprise access point, and can therefore guarantee Quality of Service all the way to the end user.”

With the two devices, the NP40 and the NP80, operators are also, once all terminals are connected, able to manage and prioritize, for example, either voice or data for best quality of service. And as the gateways are also interoperable with leading IMS solutions, such as Ericsson’s IMT solution, application servers for IP-Centrex and hosted PBX, they are expected to play an important role as operators start to offer IMS-based multimedia services to enterprise users in the future.