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Voxbone (News - Alert) recently announced that incumbent telecommunications carriers have begun routing calls to its geographically independent iNum numbers; previously used solely by VoIP providers.

Voxbone introduced iNum numbers more than a year ago. INum numbers use a global country code (883) and can ring phones anywhere in the world. They offer customers of participating service providers a globally portable number for life.

Verizon, former PTTs Belgacom (News - Alert) of Belgium, and British Telecom are the first of the incumbents to agree to route iNums. Currently, all these carriers have VoIP service offerings in place. Upon receiving calls to iNum numbers, Voxbone sends them over its global IP network to the appropriate service provider for termination. It connects incoming calls from PSTN callers, and calls between different VoIP & IM providers.

Rod Ullens, CEO of Voxbone said that gaining recognition of iNum from traditional, non-VoIP carriers is critical to iNum's long-term success and signaling a pivotal change in the thinking of the world's national carriers.

Some iNum-participating carriers provide iNum numbers to their customers. Other carriers, including Belgacom, BT (News - Alert) and Verizon, are only routing calls to the new numbers.

Routing iNum numbers brings several benefits to service providers. Initially, subscribers will be enabled to dial contacts that are on their preferred IM client or IP phone adds a valuable subscriber service. Secondly, this new connectivity generates new revenue-generating minutes. Finally, as carriers' IP build-outs progress, iNum numbers will help them create more all-IP call paths, enabling high-definition voice, video, presence, and other features to augment and extend simple voice calls. Voxbone offers iNum numbers for free to service providers.

Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, Voxbone provides worldwide local and toll-free phone numbers over its own private intercontinental VoIP network; the world's first and largest backbone dedicated to voice-origination services. The all-IP architecture of the Voxbone core network enables customers to rapidly deploy new communications services with local presence while reducing costs. It delivers high-quality call origination from 48 countries and 4,000 cities. Through its number inventory, network, self-administered provisioning and comprehensive SIP adherence, Voxbone's global infrastructure enables its customers to expand to international markets quickly and efficiently. Voxbone is the only carrier licensed in all 27 countries of the European Union. For more information, visit www.voxbone.com.