My company, Azuralis, is expanding our business into the UK market. So far we have had used a international DID aggregator with a limited SIP trunk of only a few channels.

Now we need at least 30 channels for Q3 2009, and probably around 120 channels for Q1 2010. Really not a big number of channels - but given our technical background, we probably are a "dream customer" with no support and paying our bills on time.

When I started digging into the matter, I thought that this is probably a walk in the park; I know the language, I understand the technology, and - I know a thing or two about the UK numbering plan.

Oh, boy, how wrong I was.

Requirements

As a foreign company wanting to have a UK number, there is a lot of pitfalls. Most providers will simply provide you with a non-geographic number that looks like a premium number in most countries. In this respect our requirements where quite simple: Either a local London number, a 03 or a 05 would be excellent.

Ideally we want to pay a fixed price for a number of fixed channels (let's say 30), without a hard limit on the number of channels actually in use. The reason for this that we need to have "overflow" or "elastic" capacity for at least 30% of our fixed number of channels. Our traffic pattern for this particular service consist of:

• Very low, around 20% of the fixed capacity, number of channels in sustained use during business hours.
• A few peaks for 1-3 hours where 90% of fixed number of channels are in use.
• Occasional burst where we need up to 30% of extra capacity.
• Ability for us to quickly increase the number of channels on a more permanent basis.

If I where a ITSP, a customer like this would be very welcome.

Sourcing for providers

The best source for finding a UK VoIP provider may be www.voip-info.org - however, the list is very big and does have dead links. I did start going through the list at voip-info - but this was not my only source.

Twitter is a good source for finding providers, but the only provider that bothered to contact me did a very shitty sales job when we got down to the gritty details.

Take a hint: Do not promise to deliver 03 or 05 numbers to non UK entities, and then back out into the 087x alley when the money is on the table. I will not name this company here.

I will also not name a company that, for some unknown reason, did follow me on Twitter - but never bothered to answer my initial inquiry. When I did contact this Twitter user and presented my requirements he had to direct me to "someone else". This someone else was NOT very accommodating with my questions. If I say to your salesperson: We can live without a dynamic number of channels, and are willing to pay for a fixed number of channels, your sales person should bother to follow up on this instead of telling me just to p*ss off.

Free hint #2: If your company is on Twitter, let the person(s) doing the Twittering have enough saying to be able to handle customer request directly.

Free hint #3: If your company is on Twitter, be sure to use the search functions within Twitter - or better, use @filos excellent tweefind.com.

Free hint #4: If your company is on Twitter, be sure to actually read the tweets on the people you follow: There is business to be found.

Free hint #5: It is rude to tell people to p*ss off.

I do understand English, a language spoken in the market we are entering, so using Google should be a sure source. Actually no. It is not. Given the number of inhabitants in the UK - Googling revealed that there where probably fewer VoIP operators in UK than in Norway (which has only a fraction of the UK population). A lot of marketing guys should really considering doing something else than trying to marketing their VoIP offerings in the UK market.

Of course I also used my contacts.

Providers, providers and more providers

Actually no. Just a few, selected ones.

Sipgate.co.uk

Should be a natural choice for us since we are using Sipgate in the German market. For the German market we are very happy with Sipgate.

If all you need, as a foreign company, is a simple SIP service for a extremely nice price, this is it. Easy to sign up, easy to set up. Very friendly, and quick, pre-sales user support.

However, for our use - they could not fulfill the number requirements.

Voiptalk.org

Would meet nearly all of our requirements - and the pre-sales support was excellent. Their website is probably the most informative of the companies mentioned here with regards to the UK numbering plan for people not in the know.

However, with 50% higher prices than the 2nd most expensive, this is a no-buy. If they had better prices, this would have really been a no-brainer for us.

Gradwell.com

Superb pre-sales support.

Could accommodate our requirements, but with a twist we can happily live with. Aptly priced for what we need - but not the cheapest. A sales representative telling me that my understanding of the price list is 25% higher than what the price really is, is doing a excellent job.

Importantly, they do support both IAX and SIP.

Gammatelecom.com

I got a very strong hint about contacting these people. If the hint is from the right person, I'll listen to that hint.

So I did, as with the other providers mentioned here, filled out their web form. Got an reply from a representative saying "Your enquiry is being dealt with and will be forwarded to the most suitable team. Please expect to be contacted shortly." At the time of writing this blog post, this was 7 days ago.

Not even when I asked them to give me information, I got information. Given OUR customer demands, we can unfortunately not wait any longer for their feedback.

Free hint #6: If you deal with customers, get a good customer support system where all emails goes thru, but still looks like it comes from a given person in your organizations. If you base your pre-sale support on personal mailboxes, then you are bound to loose business.

Clubtalk.co.uk

Good and fast pre-sales support. However, they do have a confusing trunking product making the price on the web much cheaper than the price received from the sales representative. Should it not be the other way around?

Lastly, how on earth is it possible to mess up one of the simplest products in the business, a SIP trunk, with a complicated price plan? I am not talking the price per minute, just the price plan for a SIP trunk.

Orbtalk.co.uk

A very strong contender. Good and fast customer support (but not personal).

Excellent prices - if you ask them.

Their trunking product is excellent if you do not require the elasticity we need for this very product.

What we learned

The UK provider market does have a few very good options. The provider market is also very hard to find; Seriously - there must be more than 6 providers out there competing with the incumbents?

We did chose one of the providers mentioned in this posting - which one we did choose will not be disclosed here yet. We will not test the the selected provider for a couple of weeks. If we are happy, I might update this posting.

If we become unsatisfied, there can be a number of reasons for this. It might be something as simple as we being a difficult customer, and then it's our fault if things does not work out.

My experience with the pre-sales for all of the providers mentioned by name in this posting (except for Gammatelecom) should be able to serve the need of your business with regards to SIP trunking in the UK. However, your requirements are not the same as our requirements for this particular business case - you will need to do your own shopping - but I do hope that this "short list" will get you started in the right direction.