consumers. Telcentris owns a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier business that provides voice and data services and enables TelCentris to collect money for each inbound call that comes into its system from outside networks. Telcentris also generates revenue by providing its Web-based communications service to small telephone companies and providing its hosted switchboard service to small and medium businesses.
The big challenge for VoxOx, as it has been all along, is differentiating itself from much larger rivals, such as Google Voice and Skype. And the big question, which also has been there from the beginning, is whether a startup competitor can get enough oxygen with Google and Skype in the space.
VoxOx spokeswoman Natasha Grach says the company’s closest mobile app competitor is Google Voice. As a much-smaller rival, Grach says VoxOx is trying to distinguish itself by emphasizing certain features that VoxOx is offering its mobile app users, such as faxing, 20-party conference calls, and “on the fly” digital recording.
It is far more difficult to compare phone rates, however.
“While rates fluctuate regularly, we tend to have lower per minute rates than Google Voice in a number of regions for international calling,” she says. “With respect to Skype,” Grach says, “it’s a bit of a more complicated calculation, but even more so in our favor. For example, we know that many of our country rates are lower and our U.S./Canada monthly unlimited plan is 15 percent lower, however Skype also charges for a phone number, caller ID, and other similar services, whereas we don’t.”
Although VoxOx doesn’t have a chart that compares rates, Grach offers offered this information about the company’s rates:
—$0.01 per minute in more than 20 countries, including the United States, Canada, U.K., Spain, Singapore, and China.
—$0.02 per minute in more than 30 countries, including Greece, Argentina, Italy, South Korea, and Japan.
—$0.02 to $0.05 per minute in more than 50 countries, including India, Russia, South Africa, Chile, Indonesia.
She notes that VoxOx users are charged for both legs of its long-distance callback service, since the company is using its system to place two inbound calls. So, for example, a user who uses the VoxOx mobile app to call Singapore from the U.S. would pay 1 penny per minute for VoxOx to place a call to the caller and 1 penny per minute to call the other party in Singapore. So the call would total 2 cents per minute.
