Flowroute: David vs. Goliath?Flowroute: David vs. Goliath?

A SIP trunking provider offers a new architecture that they claim is more in line with modern paradigms.

Flowroute is a carrier-grade wholesale VoIP provider that offers high-quality SIP trunking and DIDs. Their service scales from the VoIP hobbyist up to large call centers. According to Bayan Towiq, CEO, "Flowroute is a tech company that happens to be a carrier."

Flowroute's story is interesting because they feel that using SBCs (Session Border Controllers) in the existing telecom infrastructure is outdated. Then, there are differences in what Flowroute offers over competitors, and they touch on pain points that customers of traditional and IP services experience.

Flowroute service includes no upfront commitment, capacities for lines, calls or volumes; it simply scales on demand. They do not require or even ask customers to sign off on fraud liability or "white list agreements." Flowroute embeds technology for monitoring and alerting about potential fraud to their customers and takes a proactive approach towards security issues.

They maintain self-service customer portals for customers to manage their accounts and services online without agent involvement.

I asked Bayan about their competitors who have presence in one, two or three data centers vs. Flowroute's platform and he said, "Flowroute calls are routed point-to-point, with low latency, unlike competitors that do not have direct media delivery and route call audio indirectly, through their data centers."

Flowroute also states that they can handle bursts of 4,000 calls per second on infrastructure that costs just $100K, and separate out the signaling streams to send media directly to gateways, to achieve the lowest possible audio latency.

Next, I asked Bayan what differentiates Flowroute, and he said, "The existing telecommunications network architecture incorporating SBCs is outdated because calls are processed through a single point using a network overlay; the network overlay is the Internet overlaid onto the PSTN. Essentially, the new system is mirroring the old, rather than following modern architecture paradigms."

Flowroute is taking on the legacy PSTN network and traditional thinking. David vs. Goliath isn't just for premise gear, and I think the point of Flowroute is that they can deliver more for less than the traditional carriers while requiring substantially less infrastructure investment.

We've seen disruption to premise solutions, but when and how significant of a disruption will we see to the dominant carriers of the PSTN?

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