Voxbone

» see voxbone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Rodrigue Ullens was consulting for telecom operators in the early 2000s and kept running into the same request. Customers wanted phone numbers in countries they had no presence in. International calling was a solved problem; what they were asking for was an actual local number in Madrid or Warsaw that rang on a system somewhere else entirely. Every time, the answer was a negotiation with a national carrier plus a local entity requirement, and it took months. He and Francois Struman started Voxbone in Brussels in 2005 to sell the thing directly.

The product was unglamorous in the way that infrastructure usually is. You bought direct inward dialing numbers from a web console, local or national or mobile or toll-free, and traffic to them arrived at your own platform over SIP. Voxbone held the regulatory side and the interconnects in each country, and it supported porting so a business could move the numbers it already had. Nobody who dialed one of those numbers knew the name of the company that owned it, and nobody was supposed to.

By the time Bandwidth announced the purchase on 12 October 2020, Voxbone covered more than sixty countries, which Bandwidth described as 93 percent of global GDP, and was serving roughly nine hundred enterprises. Zoom and Skype were on the customer list, along with Uber and 8x8, and Bandwidth put Voxbone's 2020 revenue at more than $85 million, up over 25 percent year on year. Vitruvian Partners in London had held the majority since 2015. The deal closed on 2 November for an enterprise value of 446 million euros, about $519.4 million, paid as 354.6 million euros in cash plus 663,394 Bandwidth shares.

~ the case file ~

~ numbers as a product ~

What Voxbone actually sold was permission. A telephone number is not like a domain name; you cannot register one in a foreign country by filling in a form and paying twelve euros. Many national regulators attach conditions, and for years the common one was that the holder had to be established locally. That rule was written for a world where a number had to terminate on copper somewhere near the place it named.

Voxbone's business was the arbitrage between that assumption and voice over IP. Hold the licenses and the local presence in sixty countries once, at wholesale, and then rent the result out by the number to companies who only ever touch an API. It is a boring explanation of why a call center in Manila can answer a Dutch customer on an Amsterdam number, and it explains how a company founded in Brussels ended up inside the stack at Zoom during the year everybody moved onto video calls.

~ one bandwidth ~

Bandwidth is a North Carolina company with its own nationwide voice network in the United States, and Voxbone was the international half it did not have. The press release on closing day was explicit about what came next: Voxbone would operate under the Bandwidth brand, and Amaya Lantero, who had been Voxbone's chief revenue officer, would run international operations and oversee what Bandwidth called the transition to One Bandwidth. That is as clear a death notice as a brand gets, written in the language of a synergy slide.

voxbone.com answers today with a bare 404 page carrying the words "Request not logged". The network under it went on carrying calls with a different name on the bill.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »