ChannelVision Magazine

The market for 4G LTE failover services cannot be underestimated. As recently as 2016, the FCC estimated that around half of all Americans only had one option for a provider of 25 Mbps/3 Mbps fixed broadband service. Of course, cable providers have been busy building out during the last few years, but FCC assumptions still are that large parts of the country lack multiple competitive fixed providers. All the while, approximately 92 percent of the U.S. population has access to at least one fixed terrestrial service at 25 Mbps/3 Mbps and mobile LTE at speeds of 5 Mbps/1 Mbps, show 2018 FCC data. That multitude of small businesses served by just one fixed ISP will be excited to hear nexVortex’s recent an- nouncement regarding the addition of a 4G LTE option to the company’s Man- aged Hosted Voice (mHV) service. And while they’ll be relieved to know this solution effectively removes the risk of their businesses being completely out of service in the event of an internet outage, failover and business continuity for both data and voice are just part of the story. The mHV with LTE solution also offers a number of high-value en- hancements targeting voice quality that often are lacking in traditional wireless internet failover solutions. Indeed, the unique capabilities of nexVortex solutions stem from a deci- sion early on to build, own and operate the service delivery platform. “It is the only way to be able to re- act to issues rapidly, to innovate and to provide enhancements which allow our channel partners to differentiate them- selves in the market through selling our services,” explained Chuck Harris, nexVortex vice president of marketing. “That decision has proven fortuitous since it has allowed us to innovate and develop services such as mHV with LTE with a level of intelligence and functionality beyond a basic LTE failover solution.” Early in 2018, nexVortex, a long-time managed SIP provider, introduced its original Managed Hosted Voice (mHV) service. In its traditional deployment, the patent-pending service intelligently du- plicates, transmits and recombines voice packets traveling over multiple wired ISP links between the customer’s site and the nexVortex Hosted Voice platform. This effectively compensates for any packet loss (See ChannelVision , March- April 2018), a big killer of voice quality. At the heart of the service is the nexVortex Edge device, which sits on the customer premises and not only provides session quality manage- ment of the two ISP links based on SD-WAN technology but also provides a demarcation and point of entry for monitoring, and hence helps facilitate nexVortex’s promise to deliver “quality, assurance and visibility.” Circling back to the many busi- nesses residing in geographies served by only one ISP, and at great risk if that ISP has an internet disruption or a complete outage, nexVortex enhanced its mHV offering to enable the use of 4G LTE as an optional secondary ISP for all services. In this unique implementation, when internet problems occur on the primary wired ISP that adversely impact the quality of real-time Managed Hosted Voice but not data, the service will begin duplicating the voice packets over to LTE and will keep all other traffic flowing over the wired ISP. This protects voice quality while minimizing the use of the LTE data plan. In the event of a com- plete outage on the primary wired ISP, both hosted voice and all other traffic will be moved over to LTE. In either sce- nario, traffic will be returned to the wired ISP when service is restored. nexVortex has executed an agree- ment with Data2Go Wireless, a carrier- agnostic 4G LTE provider, for the LTE portion of the offering. The underlying networks that the nexVortex service will support include AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, which means the service can be delivered to any business location based on the strength of a carrier’s signal at that location. This allows users of the nexVortex service to choose different carriers at different locations but have it all contained under a single data plan. Channel partners will appreciate that mHV with LTE is delivered as a complete single-vendor solution from nexVortex, with all necessary components (mHV service, edge device, LTE modem and LTE data service) provided. “Internet outages will occur; it’s just a matter of time, and when you move voice and data to the cloud – you are at risk,” said Wes Rogers, founder and chief operating officer of nexVortex. “We have progressively added to the value of Managed Hosted Voice which now not only delivers quality, availability and visibility, but with LTE adds business continuity to protect business communi- cations. It touches all the bases.” nexVortex Adds LTE to Managed Hosted Voice Core Communications Channel Vision | September - October, 2018 70