Las Vegas — VoIP provider 8×8 announced a new fax service for its residential users alongside a new distribution agreement to promote its Virtual Office small business telephony solution, at International CES, held here last week.
The “Freedom Fax” service is based on the International Telecommunications Union’s standard for sending faxes across IP networks in real-time. According to the company, this standard provides greater reliability vs. competitive solutions that use a voice codec to send faxes.
For $9.99 a month and a one-time $29.99 activation fee, Freedom Fax subscribers will receive 300 minutes of outgoing faxes and unlimited incoming faxes. Additional domestic fax minutes are billed at 3.5 cents per minute.
8×8 also inked a distribution agreement with telecommunications master agent World Telecom Group (WTG) to resell 8×8’s residential and Virtual Office small business VoIP services.
8×8 will also offer free directory listings for its small business customers in LSSi’s national 411 directory assistance database. Residential customers will have the opportunity to be listed later in the year.
Finally, 8×8 announced that it had added over 1,000 new business customers to its Virtual Office VoIP PBX network in the fourth quarter of 2006, bringing the total subscriber base to over 6,000.
The average number of lines sold into new businesses has been rising, to over nine lines last quarter, and the company has attracting more businesses with 50 or more employees, said Huw Rees, 8×8 sales and marketing VP.
