DID

Relatives soon might be able to call their family in the Canadian Northwest for free, depending on if their Northwestern family decides to take a local number from their part of the country.

That’s because customers in northern markets including Yellowknife, Whitehorse and Inuvik now have a choice between their existing telephone provider, NorthwesTel, and a new voice-over-IP (VoIP) offering served by Iristel. Because it is offering a VoIP solution, the Iristel local direct inward phone number can not only be one from Yellowknife, Whitehorse or Inuvik, it also could be a local number from someplace else in Canada such as Toronto.

By choosing a Toronto local number, for instance, a family in Yellowknife could let their Toronto friends and family call for free.

Iristel’s inbound DID services will transport PSTN (landline/mobile) originated local calls from within Canada to a customer’s Asterisk PBX (News - Alert), IP PBX, softswitch or gateway, according to the company. Iristel also allows service providers the ability to quickly select and provision DID termination to their VoIP gateways anywhere in the world.

Such an inbound DID setup reduces the need to establish multiple points of presence, according to Iristel.

Another advantage of the Iristel inbound DID is simpler disaster recovery when a gateway fails or Internet connectivity solutions are not working. Iristel can simply route to a secondary gateway within minutes.

Iristel’s multi-channel digital trunk lines allow a limitless amount of concurrent incoming calls, according to the company. This makes it ideal for calling card companies, VoIP carriers, inbound call centers, CLEC’s and virtual carriers requiring local presence within several different locations in Canada or around the globe.

But for customers in Yellowknife, Whitehorse and Inuvik, the win is the ability to become “local” to another part of the country, even if the setup still means residents need to pay long-distance charges for their outgoing calls.

Iristel has roughly four million assigned residential and business telephone numbers on its VoIP network and currently operates in all 10 Canadian provinces, according to an article in The Globe and Mail. It has also teamed up with sister company Ice Wireless to roll out third-generation cellular services across the North, and is planning on giving Canadian’s Northwest more advanced VoIP calling features in the coming months.

“Our network is fired up, connected to the south and ready to go for people in Canada’s North who are tired of high monopoly prices for landline phone service,” said Samer Bishay, chief executive officer of Iristel, in the Globe and Mail piece.

And that’s good for Canada’s Northwest, which will go from antiquated telecommunications to the state of the art.

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