DID

A constant and dependable stream of Internet connectivity is not a luxury, but an expected service for most people in the developed world. Believe it or not, there are still areas that struggle. Canadian businessmen are feeling the crunch, as the cost of service remains extremely high in northern locations while service levels leave much to be desired.

It's not only a global economy; it's a digital economy. In areas that have poor service coupled with high rates, the struggle to keep up is very real. Northwestel, the sole provider to those in arctic regions of Canada, has a monopoly and little incentive to upgrade its services or price competitively in the market.

Companies will often manually backup their information, as sending 100s of gigabytes worth of information to another location, which can cost thousands of dollars due to the high price of moving information over the limited digital resources. While Canada's larger cities, all closer to the southern border, are enjoying the digital perks that most developed nations have, those to the northern rural territories are barely working in the digital era.

To help fix the situation, lawmakers decided it was time to open the northern territories to more vendors, according to this Iristel post. This lit a fire under Northwestel, which announced that a near $275 million upgrade was in the works. The plan reportedly involved providing 3G or 4G services to many of its communities.

The upgrade also includes offering 5MGB per second download speeds. Unfortunately, those upgrades were contingent on a deal with Northwestel's parent company, Bell, which was trying to buy Astral Media. But the Canadian regulatory board nixed the buyout, which effectively ended the funding stream for the upgrades to service to the Northern Territories.

Until those issues can be worked out, rural Canadian companies should consider a DID solution from Iristel, a global phone company that offers coast to coast certified VoIP and Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs), and provides an inbound Direct Inward Dialing (DID) service that calling card companies and VoIP carriers have grown to rely on for clear and consistent communications.

Iristel has CLEC capabilities that its inbound DID service can leverage, yet the customer still has control over the various services and products they need through their VoIP and SIP. This is of particular interest to Canadians who can utilize Iristel’s inbound DID service to transport the landline and mobile PSTN calls that are local to a customer’s Gateway (News - Alert), PBX, softswitch or Asterisk PBX.

The advantage to using this service is that it allows users to bypass the many points of presence that were needed before Iristel’s DID solution. In addition, they also enjoy the local presence that DID provides, ensuring consistent communications.

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