Updated
|
Laboring in obscurity for the past two years, TelTel is an Internet telephone company you've never heard of.
The Santa Clara company has raised $8M from venture backers, is finally blowing the covers off its plans, and thinks it can take on Skype and others by partnering with other telephone companies.
This VoIP space is now officially crowded, and there's going to be a lot of pain for some people. Vonage, which is trying to go public at a time when it is losing lots of money on every customer acquisition, is one example of an IPO with huge risk.
You're probably familiar with the landscape. There's Skype, which is all the rage, but Skype's problem is that its technology is proprietary, meaning that it is not open for integration with other networks. And we've used Skype enough to be very frustrated by its phone quality in about one out of four or five calls. (We use Skypeout to places like New Zealand, China, UK and the East Coast U.S. quite often, calling the phones of friends and family.) So we are ready to move if there is a better offering.
Then you've got a whole range of other new players, such as SIPphone, the company behind the Gizmo Project in San Diego, that offers you a way to make calls free from your PC, and which raised $6 million just two weeks ago. It is based on a protocol called SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), which has become an industry standard, and so is compatible with other services. That's why SIPphone's Michael Robertson is now offering its VoIP to third-parties as a "private label" offering.
TelTel is doing the same, but more aggressively. Selling its VoIP service to other telephone service providers will be its sole focus, TelTel's chief operating officer Jack Chang told us. "We're allowing existing service providers to become a Skype or Vonage overnight," he said.
He and a few other TelTel folks called us on TelTel conference call, and the line was as clear as day; no waiting times, no skips (true, we haven't tried it out more than the one phone call, but gee, when we tried a Skype conference call the other day, we had to cancel the call, it was so bad). TelTel has improved the phone quality for users by building out its infrastructure for the last two years, deploying servers and a "managed network" so that it can route traffic away from congestions, and bring up other nodes as needed, Chang told us.
Aside from this laser focus of working mainly with other telephone providers, TelTel sounds a lot like SIPphone. The TelTel guys don't see any point trying to make money from VoIP calls by individual users, as the cost of calls is tending toward zero. But it wants to help large telecom companies offer VoIP along with other services that give calls more value, such as desktop sharing, conferencing, audio entertainment. TelTel's service will do all this, and offers you a buddy list with information about who is present to take a call. "We're leveraging the hell out of SIP as a standard," Chang said.
And like SIPphone, TelTel is planning to launch a new product very soon. An "announcement" will come in two weeks at the VON conference in San Jose, but they are quiet on the details. It will be another way to call without being tethered to your PC, presumably where you can make VoIP calls directly from the phone.
The company says it has more than 1.5 million active users, most of them in Asia. They come via deals with six telephone providers. One is Seednet, of Taiwan, with 250,000 subscribers. The other partners will be announced this month. SIPphone, by contrast, claims 400,000 registered users in total.
TelTel's investors were Cayman Islands' Purple Communications, Cupertino's Acorn Campus and Taiwan's Parawin.
TelTel charges carriers two cents a minute to provide its service to most countries between PCs and regular phones.
Chang built a company called Blue-Silicon, which raised $17 million, but which struggled during the downturn, and was sold to TelTel early last year. CEO Sherman Tuan founded AboveNet, which was acquired by Metromedia Fiber Networks in 1999 for more than $1.5 billion