Connecting customers

Connecting customers

companies by Dave Szymanski | Tampa Bay Editor

Telovations, which uses the Internet to offer phone service, also bundles it with Internet service and connects cell phones and email to the mix.

Providing telephone service through the Internet is not new. Making sure calls aren't dropped or the caller doesn't hear warbling or an echo is more unique and challenging.

That's the goal of a young Tampa company, Telovations, which offers VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) or calls through the Internet, but through its own network using T1 lines. That is the key to the higher quality sound. It also bundles that service with the Internet and messaging services.

CEO Rick Schonbrun, 40, and St. Petersburg entrepreneur Mark Swanson founded Telovations in 2005 in Tampa's Westshore district and incorporated it in 2006. They spent most of '06 building its phone network. Telovations closed $6.5 million in series A funding, led by Lovett Miller, in February.

While the privately held firm will not reveal profits or revenues, it passed a milestone in February, processing more than a million calls throughout the country. Its customer base, now limited primarily to the Gulf Coast, is growing about 10% per month.

"We're still in a growth mode," says Schonbrun, a New York native who moved to Tampa in 1978, went to Hillsborough Community College and has worked for four other startup telecommunications companies.

"According to our plan, we're not about delivering near-term profit," he adds. "We're growing our subscriber base."

And that means continuing to reinvest in the company and raise more capital. It wants to expand throughout Florida and the Southeast in the next three years.

Schonbrun's wife Veronica came up with the company name, which refers to the convergence of telecommunications and data in a VoIP format.

Like every business, Telovations wants to help customers save money and make more money. It does that by bundling telecommunications services, such as phone, messaging and Internet service for one fee.

In summary, if you signed your company up with Telovations, you could get a system where customers would call one number and your cell and regular phone would ring. The caller's message would go to your phone, cell phone and even your email. So you're covered and hopefully more productive.

Another differentiator is that its help desk is local, which helps when callers have weather-related problems or other local concerns.

Other companies in the industry praised Telovations' commitment to sound quality, but they have also seen a lot of turnover in the industry.

"They are a middleman, supplying telecommunications service," says Lowry Whitson, president of The Whitson Group, a telecommunications equipment provider in Clearwater. "I've seen companies cycling in and out of that arena all the time. I've seen many come and go over the years.

"I have mixed feelings," Whitson adds. "I think competition is wonderful. But sometimes, these companies just come in and out a lot."

Noel Rosario, president of Lexis Telecom Inc. in Tampa, another hardware provider, agreed with Whitson.

"The problem with VoIP is that there have been a lot of fly-by-nights," Rosario says. "A lot of their service is not good. They drop calls. It all comes down to, if you're leasing a slot in a network, who you are dealing with."

What is VoIP?

VoIP allows you to make voice telephone calls over the Internet using your Internet connection. VoIP converts your voice to a digital signal that can travel over the Internet until it reaches the destination where it is converted back to a voice signal.

To use VoIP, you need to have a high-speed Internet connection. However, you don't need any special equipment, you just need your regular home telephone and a special adapter for your phone that will change the signal your voice travels in.

You can hook your regular telephone up to your cable model or through the adapter and send calls as you normally would. Also, there is no limitation on how many phones you can hook up with VoIP.

When you hook your regular home telephone to your cable modem or the adapter, then you make phone calls just as you normally would with your regular phone. You dial the same sequencing of numbers and there's no special instructions you need to remember - just pick up your telephone and dial the number you are calling. The call will sound just like a regular call as well, you can talk and hear in the same fashion you would with a regular phone.

Two kinds of VoIP services

There are two types of VoIP services: Group Services and User Services. Group Services are the services that tie all of the users of a company together under a single telecommunications system. Group services are PBX features that allow you to control how calls are handled by your telephone system.

Group Services gives you the ability to easily, and with no additional hardware, customize how calls are routed to and from your organization. The power of Group Services lies in its ability to unify your company's telecommunication system under a single umbrella regardless of the physical location of your offices. Home Offices can even be incorporated into your telephone system.

The Auto-Attendant is an example of a Group Service. With a Voice over IP Auto-Attendant, calls can be automatically routed to any geographic location within your company. Calls can even be routed automatically transferred to a home office or a cell phone.

User Services are features of your phone system that your employees can customize to meet the unique requirements of their position within your organization. Examples of User Services include voicemail and call forwarding.

One of the chief advantages of switching to VoIP is that you don't have to change phone numbers - in most cases you can keep your old phone number and just switch providers.

Price reduction of phone services is also one of the big advantages to using VoIP phone services, because of the way that the VoIP phone service companies around Tampa Bay rate their calls, it is much cheaper to talk to people from around the world as long as they have an Internet connection. You can also talk to more than one person at the same time with VoIP phone services at no extra cost.

You can use VoIP even when your computer isn't on, as long as your Internet connection is live and on. This can translate into savings on your power bill because you do not have to leave your computer running in order to use your VoIP phone service.

You can use your VoIP even when you travel, as long as you have access to a high speed Internet connection.

The most common disadvantage with VoIP is calls being disconnected or having a problem connecting because of a slow or unreliable Internet connection. You should have an Internet connection of at least 90 kbps to ensure a good voice quality while you are using VoIP.

Other disadvantages include:

• Dependence on the Internet, which can go down.

• Lost when the power is out.

• 911 calls cannot be automatically traced as they are with land lines.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Company: Telovations, Tampa

Industry: Telecommunications

Key: Using about 3,000 telephone lines, processing more than 1 million telephone calls per month, Telovations is growing the customer based at 10% each month.