As the least-cost routing (LCR) market moves out from under the shadows of litigation, communications solutions provider TelePassport has launched an LCR product aimed at smaller switchboards.
Dubbed "Genie", the product is a PABX-independent call line-switching device that allows outgoing phone calls from a switchboard to be routed to specific outbound lines according to pre-defined cost tables resident in its memory.
LCR made news recently, with Telkom actively trying to block such services by third-parties. However, the legal battles have not gone Telkom`s way and the market seems to be expanding.
TelePassport MD Anton Potgieter says with the recent validation of the legality of LCR, he expects a strong increase in LCR and associated businesses in 2004. "Our aim with the Genie box is to give the small to medium-sized enterprise access to premium LCR service that big corporates with smart PABXs are enjoying."
Potgieter says smaller customers in the marketplace often have older PABX technology which does not support proper automated route select, and therefore in many companies phone users have to make use of tedious manual "pickup codes" in order to access their LCR savings routes.
In addition, smaller PABX systems often have limited or no automatic routing functionality due to production cost-cutting. This generally leads to significant loss of savings as staff either forget or do not make the effort to use these pickup codes, and the savings routes lie dormant.
"The Genie box meets this problem head-on, by transparently adding fully automated LCR functionality to any DTMF analogue switchboard," Potgieter says.
He says Genie also solves two other problems found with implementing LCR on smaller PABXs - the cost of buying an additional line card and vendor call-out to program the LCR solution.
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