Jeff Goldman, the editor of Internet based portal ISP-Planet interviewed Jody Schnarr, a PortaOne’s customer, who is the President of 295.ca, a Canadian ISP, and a long-distance company Worldline.
Until recently, the company used a billing system it had developed in-house, but Scharr says they recently switched to PortaOne’s solutions for both companies. “With PortaSwitch, PortaSIP and PortaUM, it really made a lot of sense for us to buy their whole system and merge everything together,” he says.
Before choosing PortaOne, Schnarr says, the company looked at a wide range of different billing systems. “One of the biggest points that overshadowed any other option was that they use open source products,” he says. “The database is open—it’s MySQL—and they use Apache and FreeBSD and Perl. I’ve been in situations where I’ve had vendors that have closed, and I’ve been out of the loop: it’s their code, it’s proprietary, and I can’t get inside. In this case, I have all the code, and I can do whatever I want with it.”
And the unlimited pricing model, he says, is another key benefit. “The voice over IP product is a SIP switch, it has Vonage-type services, but the pricing model is such that when you buy it, you pay for the code and you can use it as much as you want,” Schnarr says. “We have 70,000 users we’re porting over to the system, and we add 5,000 users a month—other billing solutions can get very expensive for somebody who’s adding on customers.”
The full article can be found on the ISP-Planet website.
