Connection Telecom and EOH Network Solutions ink nationwide partnership
Mutual customer benefit as premier cloud PBX service meets 1st-tier next-generation network.
Connection Telecom, South Africa’s leading cloud-based PBX service provider[1], has signed a collaborative national partnership with EOH Network Solutions to offer its hosted voice services on EOH’s next-generation network (NGN), the companies announced.
Connection Telecom’s MD, Dave Meintjes, says the bidirectional partnership offers mutual benefit to the companies and their respective customer bases.
“By aligning ourselves with a new partner we have already registered a noticeable quality improvement in our voice termination services to existing customers,” Meintjes says.
EOH sees positives for its customers too. “The partnership will allow us to extend the country’s premier hosted voice service, based on Connection Telecom’s Telviva platform, to our customer base,” says Eduard du Plessis, CEO at EOH Network Solutions.
Choosing partners
Excellent track record
du Plessis says Connection Telecom was selected after considerable market analysis. “Telviva has had an excellent track record since 2004, prompting us to align ourselves with the market leader rather than embark on a lengthy development cycle of our own,” he explains.
Voice-centric focus
Connection Telecom further has fully-redundant hosting arrangements with data centre provider Teraco. “We are secure in the knowledge that our partner has a focused approach to voice-only services as well as the partnerships to back our clients’ businesses,” says du Plessis.
Carrier-graded national NGN
EOH, in turn, has been developing a carrier-grade national NGN over a number of years and signed ‘interconnect’ agreements with the major operators (Telkom, MTN and Vodacom) and alternative telcos
This has allowed it to provide a range of quality-assured network-based outsourcing services – including managed network services, Internet access, mail cleaning, security and a host of others – but also to position itself as a first-choice network partner to voice service providers.
Meintjes says after much consideration, Connection Telecom decided to partner with EOH Networking Solutions on this basis, to attain greater quality assurance for its customer base.
Quid pro quo
As a result of pooling expertise and resources, the companies have been able to scale up their respective customer offerings without further investment.
EOH Network Solutions will provide voice termination (telco) services to Connection Telecom’s customers in addition to its own, offering the combined customer pool high-quality calls at a lower rate than the incumbent operators.
In exchange, Connection Telecom will extend its highly-rated hosted service to EOH customers, and offers its own customers – as well as EOH’s customers – an expanded community within which they can make free ‘on-net’ calls.
“Our business is creating zero-rated communities for our customers and those of our partners,” says Meintjes. “We believe our customer base and that of EOH Network Solutions will find much mutual benefit from this large and growing community.”
Mutual benefit
du Plessis says the volume of traffic switched to the EOH network has brought a significant fillip to the company’s business. As for Connection Telecom, the company has registered an increase in its Mean Opinion Score (MOS) quality ratings, assigning EOH’s network service a rating almost equal to that of Telkom.
“This is a tremendous endorsement of the quality of our network,” says du Plessis. “We believe our focus on network elements, like our insistence on focused partners, will give us the edge time and again.”
