TMCnews Featured Article

Iraqi Kurdistan has been investing in infrastructure in recent years – and a key reason for the region’s technical advancement is the services offered by Neide Telecom.

Founded in 2009, it was the first provider in Iraq to offer VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). It also provides support for SIP (Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert)) trunking, SIP interconnections with other carriers, ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and PSTN (public switched telephone network) services.

Neide Telecom also has global points of presence (POPs) deployed in Tier 1 global data centers and over a hundred national POPs.

So, much was at stake for the nation and worldwide when Neide Telecom was looking for a software platform to support its operations. It looked to PortaOne's (News - Alert) PortaSwitch.

"We felt PortaSwitch was the best possible choice," Jihad Ibhaiss, Neide Telecom general manager, said in a recent statement. "Unlike many other software products on the market, PortaSwitch gave us very attractive options to create as many SIP accounts as we wanted, and as many interconnections with our partners as we needed."

PortaSwitch provides a billing software system, Class 4-5 softswitch, and media application server solution. It can offer users call control, converged billing functions, proxying and routing. It also “unifies voice and data traffic within a single network. Moreover, the platform provides billing and provisioning as well as a host of network functions including SIP call control, unified messaging, IP Centrex and hosted IP PBX (News - Alert), callback management, IVRs, (and) conferencing,” the company explains in a statement.

"One of the things that makes us different and competitive in our market is our ability to offer SIP-to-SIP calls free of charge, plus very low rates for national and international calls within and outside of Iraq," Fadhil Ali, voice manager at Neide Telecom, said in the statement. "PortaSwitch helps reinforce our low-cost, high-service reputation. Through the PortaSwitch customer self-care portal, for example, our customers can access their historic data, call records and active calls."

When it comes to support, Ali noted how PortaSwitch gives the company “an extremely instrumental facility to debug failed calls by using call-trace messages. If we require more advanced support, PortaOne provides excellent 24/7 technical assistance at very reasonable fees.”

In addition, Ibhaiss noted how the company, and consumers and businesses throughout Iraqi Kurdistan, benefit from the use of PortaSwitch's “scalability, ease of implementation and ability to add services as needed.”

"We have never experienced any downtime with PortaSwitch,” Ibhaiss said. “That has significantly lowered our labor costs and helped us stay on top of our customers' expectations."