Sure, you’ve heard of Skype or Vonage. Of course, you know about Asterisk. But if you haven’t been watching the VoIP industry much, you’d be surprised to learn there are a handful of startups out there that are looking to servicing the consumer market (read: those who just want a telco-like company to service their VoIP needs, instead of having to install their own hardware/software).

Residential Services

VoIP News lists 25 of these startups that each have their own advantages and features. Here’s a summary.

SunRocket - This new company features very low calling rates to Asia–as low as one cent per minute. Not a big company yet, but they are fast growing.

Via Talk - ViaTalk offers flat rates instead of per-minute calling charges. It’s said the charges are so low you pay by the year instead of monthly. Starting from $199 per year, you get the whole shebang of VoIP services like voice mail, e911, caller ID and even fax.

Streamlined communication

First Hand Technologies - First Hand lets you integrate your telephony system to make it easier to reach everyone in your organization, whether they’re mobile, at home, or even out of the country. People can call your office number and they can get connected to your mobile phone if you choose so.

Grand Central - This service lets you connect ALL your telecoms devices such that they ALL ring when you get a call on your assigned number. You then have a choice of answering whichever phone or device you currently have access to (or send the call to voice mail). Everything can be controlled via Web interface.

LignUp - This is an integrator that offers consulting services to companies that want to unify businesses’ messaging platforms. “e 100 percent software, native-SIP platform enables solution integrators and service providers to quickly create unique, high margin VoIP applications and services.”

Logitel - Logitel is a company that integrates VoIP with mobile telephony, apparently the first company to do so. Logitel also offers back-office services for their client companies.

We’ll continue the list of interesting VoIP startups in our next post.

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