The AT&T Phone for Business-Advanced combines the reliability of plain old telephone service (POTS) with digital lines’ voice quality, security and lower maintenance costs, according to the carrier.
The new service, which is now available to almost every business in the U.S., aims to provide advanced services to businesses that use POTS for voice as well as alarms, elevators, fax machines, modems and point-of-sale terminals.
The new service relies upon cloud capabilities from RingCentral and analog to digital converters from DataRemote. It also can use the AT&T wireless network if needed.
The approach brings the analog traffic to the enterprise-grade DataRemote appliance, which digitizes it. It then is transferred to a VoIP Managed Facility Voice Network (MFVN).
In addition to security, quality and cost advantages, AT&T says that the service provides businesses with continuity, data monitoring centers, security, 24/7 capabilities via AT&T’s wireless network and 12 hours of operations via an internal battery backup.
“Until now, traditional wireline phone service has been hard to beat for specialty data and voice lines,” Rich Shaw, AT&T’s Vice President, Voice and Collaboration, said in a press release. about AT&T Phone for Business-Advanced. “With AT&T Phone for Business-Advanced, we’ve found a way to modernize these lines to introduce customers to new cloud capabilities while maintaining the reliability and regulatory compliance that they require.”
The press release does not include pricing information.
Verizon also took on the issue of digitally updating traditional business phones to better serve modern businesses this week with the announcement of the One Talk T67LTE desk phone. The desk phone, which is provided by Yealink, eases operations – especially for mobile workers – by using the Verizon LTE network and bypassing the Ethernet wiring, firewall and wireline connection usually associated with desktop business phones.
RingCentral and AT&T have worked together before. In 2018, AT&T announced Office@Hand, which aimed to provide cloud-based communications to more businesses. The service, which is based on the RingCentral Office platform, enables work from “virtually anywhere.”
