Quick Quiz: What does West Corp. have in common with IP-Telephony specialist Bandwidth.com?

A: Both have made acquisitions of companies that specialize in E9-1-1 (Emergency 911) service providers. As reported here, Bandwidth.com has acquired dash Carrier Services for an undisclosed sum of money. It puts the VoIP provider on track to reach $100 million in revenues in 2011. West bought Intrado back in 2006, which was early in its acquisitive path toward becoming a $2 billion company.

Today West Corp. is organized into two major areas of operations. Unified Communications is made up primarily of conferencing services, “hosted collaboration” facilities and outbound alerts and notification. Its Communications services division includes operation of contact centers (with live agents) and “Automated Services,” an umbrella term that lumps Intrado’s E911 services with the speech-enabled IVR offerings of West Interactive (which now includes HollyConnects and Tuvox).

Bandwidth.com is, admittedly, another kind of animal in the Recombinant Communications Genome. Its core operations are “lower in the stack” of communications solutions. Where West might be thought of as an ASP (Application Service Provider) 2.0, Bandwidth.com is primarily an ISP (Internet Service Provider) 2.0, that distinguished itself by being an early entrant into the VoIP (Voice over IP) marketplace. Its Phonebooth.com service was one of the first self-service VoIP products targeting small businesses and bringing low-price enhanced telephony features to any business with Internet access.

The dash acquisition could be transformational to bandwidth.com. It brings an advanced form of location-awareness into Bandwidth.com’s fabric. At one point dash was characterized as a “reseller” of Intrado services, but a company spokesperson tells me that dash has its own, proprietary software, systems and infrastructure for E911. The key components include “address validation” utilities that show 98% accuracy even for calls from “nomadic” (i.e. “mobile”) phones. Its ability to locate callers is not dependent on the static data from the “Master Street Address Guide” (MSAG) that traditional 911 has always depended on. dash also tells me that dash maintains its own files of geographic boundaries for the areas served by individual Public Service Access Points (PSAPS), which are the contact centers where 911 dispatchers work.

With the acquisition, Bandwidth.com strengthens its position as a carriers’ carrier and a key enabler as VoIP carriers continue to compete for a growing share of business, residential and “nomadic” conversations. Incumbent carriers used to shoot down competitive threats from Vonage and its cohort of competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) based on their inability to provide E911 services. Now it is becoming routine for VoIP carriers to have access to emergency services that are qualitatively better than those offered by the incumbents.

dash also offers a full suite of wholesale carrier products and services, such as domestic
and Canadian SIP origination and termination, CNAM (which is Calling Name delivery that supports CallerID), N11, and directory listing services. Bandwidth.com’s customers and go-to-market partners can build some formidable service offerings from these building blocks. That’s what Recombinant Communications (RC) is all about.

Categories: Articles

Tags: VoIP, IP-based telephony, Recombinant Communications, E911