Internet service providers used to do one thing – provide internet access. In the early days, this consisted primarily of dial-up. Like all things technology, internet service offerings advanced. Access paths got faster and less expensive. Most added some flavor of broadband and high-speed dedicated access. The big differentiator, though, was whether or not the ISP was selling their own service to clients or reselling someone else’s service.
Every ISP at some level buys service from a larger provider. Unless they’re going out buying up fiber networks and building their own backbone, they’re buying (discounted or wholesale) bandwidth or IP services from other carriers. In most cases, broadband was a resold service.
Fast forward twenty years and the picture remains relatively the same. There are just less ISP’s out there. Those who remain have had to evolve to add high speed dedicated access options as well as Voice over IP services like SIP and hosted PBX. The primary differentiator, though, remains the same. Is the ISP selling you their service, or reselling someone else’s?
Why Resale Versus Direct Matters
Here at N2Net we own our own network. What that means is we own our own routers, switches, firewalls, and the infrastructure to support it. Way back when the internet was just starting, we bought a big block of public IP addresses, so we own our own IP space. Like every other ISP out there, however, we buy upstream access from several larger carriers. These carriers offer us multiple different pathways out to the internet.
So when you buy a Metro Ethernet connection from us, you’re connecting directly to our network. When your traffic hits our router, we look for the best path and send your traffic out to the internet via that carrier’s route. We offer static IP addresses with the service. Those are our IP addresses.
The fact that we own our network may not mean a lot to you, but it’s a big deal. It means that we have control of the circuit from end to end. In the world of dedicated access and especially VoIP, it’s huge.
Control Matters When it Comes to VoIP and Disaster Recovery for VoIP
Just as we own our router and switching infrastructure, we also own the VoIP infrastructure. Your Hosted PBX installation is being set up on servers which reside in our (local) data center. Your phone numbers live on servers here at our data center. This control offers us the ability and flexibility to manage and route your voice traffic in the same way we would your data traffic.
Let’s say you own your own IP phone system. In that scenario, you could use a Metro Ethernet connection from your office to our network for voice and data. Your minutes and usage would come from N2Net. Then, should your local system fail, we would be able to reroute all your voice traffic to a hosted instance, transparent to the caller. This is just one example.
Other ISP’s who are simply reselling a larger carrier’s VoIP service isn’t going to have that kind of flexibility. They are always going to be limited by what the larger carrier is willing to allow them to do. This is why N2Net is one of the few ISP’s who are able to guarantee call quality with VoIP. It’s because we control the network and connection to you.
Partner With Experts
Here at N2Net we’ve grown and advanced as ISP and VoIP technology has advanced. We maintain ownership and control of our own network and have the engineering and support expertise to architect custom voice and data solutions for our clients.
Talk to one of our experts today and learn how to best leverage what we’ve built for your business!
