Fonality, the leader in affordable IP-PBX systems for small businesses and the world's largest distributed deployment of Asterisk™, today announced that Business 2.0 has named Fonality one of "The Next Net 25." According to the magazine, Business 2.0 editors selected Fonality as one of 25 companies "in the vanguard" of the "new Web revolution." Editors selected companies "whose approaches help illuminate where the Web is headed and where the opportunities lie." "The Next Net 25" includes five categories. Fonality was selected as one of five companies within the category titled "The New Phone." "For nearly a century, the phone, and voice as we know it, has existed largely in the confines of a thin copper wire," the editors wrote. "But now service providers can convert voice calls into tiny Internet packets and let them loose on fast connections, thus mimicking the traditional voice experience without spending hundreds of millions on infrastructure. All you need are powerful--but cheap--computers running specialized software. The Next Net will be the new phone, creating fertile ground for new businesses." The magazine article states that the editors recognized Fonality in "The Next Net 25" because "it sells a $1,000 box that allows a PC to use open-source software to mimic a PBX system that costs five times as much." "The recognition of Fonality as part of 'The Next Net 25' is a great endorsement of our vision to couple the low-cost dynamics of Open Source software and standardized PC hardware into a price-disruptive solution for small business customers who have been overcharged by proprietary PBX companies for far too long," said Chris Lyman, founder and CEO of Fonality. "With over 10 million calls placed on over 10,000 lines around the world, our customers are validating Business 2.0's vision for 'The New Phone' everyday." Fonality's PBXtra product line provides today's small businesses with an enterprise-class phone system for 40 percent to 80 percent less than the cost of traditional PBX systems. PBXtra's enterprise-class features include telecommuting, branch office support, voicemail-to-email, click-to-call, VoIP, softphones, support for IP and analog phones, and advanced call center functionality. Fonality has streamlined and simplified the complex tasks of PBX setup, administration and management to make PBXtra the world's first enterprise-class phone system that can be installed and administered remotely using a Web browser, without specialized training. In describing the Next Net, the editors wrote: "The Next Net will encompass all digital devices, from PC to cell phone to television. Its defining characteristics include the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe -- not by, say, instant messaging, but by evolving instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging apps that will make today's e-mail and IM seem crude." The Next Net article is in the March issue of Business 2.0 and was written by Erick Schonfeld, Om Malik and Michael V. Copeland. The article is available at CNN.com. For more information about Fonality and PBXtra, visit www.fonality.com.
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