22nd February 2006

London, Sydney - 22nd February 2006: Vega 400 IP-to-TDM gateways are leading the assault on the near-monopoly for fixed telephone services enjoyed by Telstra in Australia. VoIP provider Ivox Communications has deployed multiple Vega 400 gateways to interconnect its VoIP service to the public network. Ivox delivers high quality voice services for resale by Australian ISPs and other alternate providers. As one of the first companies into this new market, launching in 2004, Ivox has attained its leading position by focussing on the quality of its service.

"With no real competition for local loop to consumers, the alternate telephone service market in Australia is constrained to the enterprise and SME market," said Ivox CEO Romain Bonjean. "In this market you cannot compromise on quality albeit the service is highly competitively priced. Our call quality is assured by using TDM telephony backhauls to all 66 Australian call collection zones, plus a nationwide MPLS data network to ensure the fastest and most reliable IP connectivity to all areas of Australia. iVox uses banks of Vegastream gateways to provide the interconnections between our IP telephony network, our TDM call carriage network, and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). This underlying transport quality is supported by a world-class billing system."

"We chose the VegaStream solution because it provided the ISDN signalling and number translation support that allows us to offer a national footprint for a comprehensive call collection and termination service," said Romain. "We have not experienced a single gateway failure since we launched the service a year ago and the call quality remains consistently high even though we have operated at peak capacity."

"Speed to market is critical. The Vega 400's reliability and ease of configuration enables us to react quickly to meet our customers' demands to refine their offering and to evolve new services such as hosted PBX and video," said Romain.

Ivox has deployed multiple Vega 400s at its Sydney network operations centre. Each Vega 400 can support up to 120 simultaneous calls. Ivox also deploys Vega gateways as customer premise equipment. "We initially deployed gateways from Quintum, but the VegaStream kit is simply better quality and provides more flexibility," said Romain.

"We are delighted to have Ivox Communications as one of our first Australian customers. The combination of quality VoIP gateways, stable IP backbone and a flexible billing system provides a winning strategy in migrating legacy telephony environments to the more cost effective and feature rich world of VoIP" said Chris Papaioanou, Sales & Marketing Director for VegaStream South Pacific.

About Ivox
Ivox Communications is a privately funded company, formed in 2004 to build a national VoIP carrier grade network and provide wholesale services to internet and telephone service providers. iVox Communications' IP Telephony infrastructure is built around a nationwide TDM telephony backhaul network, with presence in all 66 Australian call zones, as well as a nationwide MPLS data network for the fastest and most reliable IP communications available in Australia today. This backbone, coupled with iVox's carrier-class softswitches, has been engineered to deliver voice call quality equal to if not better than a standards POTS line. End users are connected to our network via their broadband IP service provider and the public internet. Ivox terminates calls in Australia and globally through a variety of carriers. Ivox is a wholesale business focussed on the requirements of our service provider partners and in particular, what solutions they need to meet their own customers' expectations. The company provides a range of hardware, systems, billing and support features that make life easy for service providers and their customers.

For additional information please contact:

Media Contacts:
VegaStream Australia: Chris Papaioanou
Tel: +61 (0) 2 82069606

VegaStream International: Mark Weeks
Tel: +44 (0) 1252 658881

iVOX Communications
Romain Bonjean
Tel: +61 (0)2 82520201