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NodePhone Goes National |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Thursday, 13 March 2008 |
National ISP Internode has reached a major milestone in its VoIP service roll-out and is now able to offer a full national reach for its
NodePhone2 voice-over-broadband service. The service now extends to 2100 zones
covering Australia's smallest regional areas.
This has allowed the company to offer a national 18-cent untimed call rate to any fixed
phone in the country and to provide subscribers with a local number in any phone zone in the country. At the same time it has also more than quadrupled the coverage of its newly MultiLine service, which provides on-demand access to extra phone
channels. Internode has added an additional 121 zones to the original 37 it offered to make 158 zones.
The company says its extensive reach places its service above most other Internet-based VoIP services, which only offer phone numbers in
major metropolitan areas and NodePhone
product manager, Jim Kellett, says the extended reach is
part of Internode's commitment to regional customers. "Most VoIP
services only offer in-dial numbers for metropolitan centres or, at
best, large regional towns," he said. "While
that suits some people, it is frustrating for potential regional
customers whose next door neighbour may have to pay for a "long
distance" call to reach them by phone.
"To
solve this problem, Internode has worked for more than a year to add
the capability for new NodePhone2 customers to select their NodePhone2
telephone number in any local calling zone in the country. That
capability is now available - meaning that NodePhone2 customers all the
way from Aberfoyle to Zamia Creek can now have a telephone number that
is local to where they live," he said.
NodePhone
customers require a broadband service that runs at speeds of 512
kilobits per second or faster in order to take advantage of the
NodePhone service. NodePhone is designed to run on third party
broadband services as well as Internode-provided plans.
In
other news Internode is reportedly gearing up to provide ADSL2+ with
Annex M on its own Naked DSL services later this year. The Annex M
upgrade allows for much faster upload speeds taking the typical ADSL2+
upstream rate from about 1Mbps to 2.5Mbit/s. The service is only
available on service provided by the company's own DSLAMs as the other
service provided by the ISP are wholesaled from Optus which does not
have the capability for Annex M speeds.
Customers interested in accessing the faster speed will need to
equip themselves with a modem that supports the standard, but many
ADSL2+ modems sold in the past year and a half already have the
capability.
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