WPCNR JUST BUSINESS. By John F. Bailey. September 23, 2004: Paul Riss is a softball dad in White Plains, whose daughter has played and participated in the White Plains Little League and the White Plains Explosion for a number of years, so when WPCNR got a news release from Paul about his company offering internet calling, which WPCNR simply does not understand, it was a natural to give Paul Riss, the CEO of eLEC Communications in White Plains a call and ask what is internet phone all about.
THE LITTLE BLACK BOX THAT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU PHONE: Reached at his office, Riss explained that eLEC Communications, is offering a little black box that bypasses your local phone company and can chop the cost of local calls through Verizon in half. When WPCNR pointed out I paid Verizon $90 a month, ATT & T Wireless $125 a month (on a conservative month), and US Sprint a $100 a month for long distance, Ray Burke, his publicist said, “John, you should definitely get one.” Riss is so eager to get the Voice Adaptor Box out to the public, that he is making a special offer to readers of the White Plains CitizeNetReporter. If you call eLEC and order the Voice Box Adapter, and mention the White Plains CitizeNetReporter, Mr. Riss will give you the Voice Box Adaptor free. Photo, Courtesy, eLEC Communications
I asked Paul what makes his VOIP box different from your ttypical telemarketer slammer call.
Riss said it is a box available only to households and businesses equipped with DSL Broadband lines that allows you to use your home or business phone, keeping the same number or numbers, over the internet — bypassing Verizon equipment and line charges, turning long distance calls into pennies, not dollars — while providing answering service, call-waiting and a host of other features through the eLEC Communications package.
Riss’s company eLEC Communications Corporation, was formerly named Circo International, a luggage company, handling big name lines like Dunlop and Perry Ellis and Samsonite where he had to deal with inventory, styles, storage.
He got into the telephone business because, as he puts it “there’s no inventory. I’m just selling minutes.” eLEC Communications is now profitable on an operations basis for the last six quarters and Riss sees VOIP ( for “Voice Over Internet Protocal”) as the future in telephone communications.
Southwest Pacific Bell, “the last of the baby bells,” as Riss termed them, thinks so to. This week Southwest PacBell signed up Ford Motor Company for 50,000 lines to their VOIP network.
In response to my question of what is VOIP, Riss said, “It’s a product made by Grandstream. It allows you to take your regular analog phone and make it into a digital phone so you can make calls over your high speed internet connection. There’s a hookup so you can plug your computer in and your phone in so your computer can be on while you’re using your phone.” WPCNR PhotoCapture from Grandstream website.
Gentlemen, Jam in Your Jacks. No Technician Needed. Riss says.
“The box (known as a VOX Adapter Box) plugs into your internet connection. Then it has three separate ports, a LAN ( for Land Area Network) port, a WAN (for Wide Area Network) port, and a Phone port. You plug your broadband connection into the WAN. You plug your computer into the LAN, and you plug your phone into the Phone Port. With those three connections, you’re basically up and running. It’s meant to be a plug-and-play device.”
At the present time, he’s shipping it to select cellphone stores in Manhattan, that are “selling it off the shelf.” Riss says, the VOX Adapter Boxes come preprogrammed with a phone number and an IP address. “Right now they’re all 212 area codes. You go home and plug this in. Now you have another phoneline and it’s a 212 area code. Now, once you start doing that and you’re comfortable with it, we’d like to take your home number or your business phone number whichever it is and port that over, so your regular home number will ring on this internet phone also, and that way you can ditch your local phone carrier.”
Riss said he has 914 area code numbers available and shortly will be able to supply area codes nationwide.
Riss stressed you don’t need a technician to install it. He says it’s more “complicated” if you have SDSL at home. ADSL or cable (such as Optimum online), seems to work “within five minutes,” he reports, “and you’ll be calling over the internet.” His company provides 24/7 technical support with very easy-to-understand instructions.
THE ONE COMPUTER SETUP for the Voice Adapter Box. Other Family computers and phones simply plug into your normal telephone jacks, and work like “extenstions,” only eLEC is routing the calls to the internet. Photo of Illustration from eLEC Communications Instructions.
Advantage: Price and the usual Features—Bundled.
For users, Riss reports, the Vox Adapter Box is a lower cost product. His box which he buys wholesale from Grandstream (www.grandstream.com) also comes with bundled features. Those features Riss includes are now “extras” that Verizon, the CitizeNetReporter’s telephone company charges for.
“We have free features with it, Riss explains, “meaning voicemail, callforwarding, callwaiting. If you buy this from Verizon or any phone company they’re charging a lot of money for the features.”
(Verizon charges me $11 a month for its custom calling package and Voice Mail Service.)
Penny a Minute vs. 2.4 Cents A Minute.
When told of the CitizeNetReporter phone bill levels, Riss pointed out “If you get this product, your usage drops dramatically. How about this: I have a friend who has a diner. Every morning his 200 faxes go out. Each fax takes about 25 seconds, say. Verizon charges him a 3-minute minimum for each fax. He’s paying $15 a day to send out his menu every morning of his specials to the 200 people on his fax list. At $15 a day, if he faxed over an IP connection, that 25 or 30 seconds, we’re only charging him half a penny, because we’re charging him a penny a minute. Half a penny times 200 faxes, that’s only a dollar, instead of $15.”
No Changing of Phone Number.
Riss says that everyday thousands of people are making the switch or “porting” their number to “Voice Over IP,” as this connection is called. “There’s local number portability between phone companies. We would port over your number over to us so Verizon no longer has it. Verizon’s no longer billing you. We’re billing you. We offer an unlimited voice package for $29.95 a month, (by contrast, WPCNR paid $180 in August for one month of local and long distance plus service) which includes unlimited dialing in the U.S. both for local and long distance, and for international rates we have more than twenty countries available at only 2 cents a minute.”
Custom Country Calling Envisioned.
Riss pointed out the advantage of the Internet VOIP call: “As we start rolling it out more, we’re thinking of doing some ethnic marketing. If you have our product and we’re charging you 2 cents a minute to Germany, Italy, Israel, Hong Kong, parts of Russia, we can interest a bunch of ethnic groups who are calling home all the time.
“Even better,” Riss continued, warming to the possibilities his Voice Adaptor Box offers,
“a distributor who has a big business in Latin America, told me, if I ship our Vox Adapter Box (with a 212 number) to Venezuela then he has a lot of people in Queens or Brooklyn who (would send a eLEC Voice Box to relatives in South America) and would call that number and it would be a local call for that person calling from Brooklyn, even though the phone is ringing in Venezuela.”
Take Your Voice Box With You. Keep Your Former Number.
In speaking with Ray Burke, of Beacon Rock Research, a consultant to Mr. Riss, Burke pointed out that a person who moves to say California or anywhere in the United States, could take their Vox Adapter Box with them, never have to change their phone number. While waiting for their phone service and DSL line to be hooked up at their new residence, they could immediately begin making calls, using their former telephone number.
One customer of eLEC Communications did that when they moved to South Carolina rather than change their number with all their New York clients, Riss said. Vox Adapter Box allows their New York clients to contact them in South Carolina without long distance charges.
Monitored it for 5 years.
Riss said the progress in Voice Over Internet Protocol, over the last five years has been amazing. “We’ve been looking at it for over the last four or five years, and the technology equipment is really working now and the beauty of it is, it’s a computer. If someone calls us up and says I want my phone to do this, and eLEC does not have that feature, we can say to them call us back next week. It’s just a guy writing software to do it. We can do special software for ring tones for your children, your boss. It’s caller i.d.”
Selling the Razor to Make Money on the Blades
Riss reports the eLEC is selling the Voice Adapter Box for less than half what its manufacturer, Grandstream, is selling it for on the internet. “What we’re doing to encourage people to buy our product is, the cell phone stores selling it are charging $29.95, already programmed with an I.P. address and phone number. It’s yours to keep. Eventually we hope you just give up your Verizon line and move it over to our VOIP platform, but you may as well run them parallel for 3 or 4 months before you do it. A lot of consumers are already are paying for high speed access, why should they have to pay for a separate land line coming in. They can just use that high speed access connection to make their voice calls.”
Riss said that if persons or businesses wishing to try the Voice Adapter Box Service mentioned they read about it on the White Plains CitizeNetReporter, he would include the Voice Adaptor Box free, a $29.95 value, and start our readers on the $9.95 a month service.
Can Be Used with Cellphone.
Riss notes there is also a way to have the Voice Adapter Box ring your cellphone. “When someone calls you your cellphone can ring, your home phone can ring, and your vacation house can ring all at the same time. We can do call forwarding to each line. If someone calls your house. You’ll still have inbound calls, counting on your inbound minutes.”
A Raft of Services Verizon Charges For Bundled.
Burke said that after a consumer purchases the Voice Adapter Box for $29.95, a one time only fee, they can opt for two plans.
For $9.95 a month they get all local calls for 1 penny a minute, and can place all long distance calls through the United States for 1.9 cents a minute. Riss said, for comparison, Verizon charges 2-1/2 cents per minute for local calls, and U.S. Sprint, WPCNR’s carrier for long distance, 3.4 to 3.9 cents per minute.
Savings Make Reporter’s Jaw Drop.
WPCNR notes this is a tremendous swing. In a call I made to Denver Colorado at 12:45 P.M. in August, WPCNR paid $5.20 cents for a 13 minute call. At the eLEC Communications Voice Adapter Box rate, that call would have cost me 13 cents.
Mr. Burke noted that for the $9.95, eLEC throws in the following goodies: “For $9.95, you get Free voice mail, free call waiting, free caller i.d., free caller forwarding, free three-way calling, free call transfer, free call return, repeat dialing, call hunt, call blocking, ring selection, anonymous call rejection, do not disturb, extension dialing, international call blocking, speed dialing. It’s amazing.”
3% Excise Tax Only.
Riss said that he passes along the charge Verizon charges him for patching through a call to a non internet user, and terminating the call on the local phone wire. That charge is included in the $9.95 a month charge plus a 3% excise tax for the data transfer on both the 9.95 charge and the local and long distance charges. On the $9.95 that amounts to 30 cents.
For $20 more a month, eLEC offers unlimited calling an international calling package including the U.S., Canada, and twenty overseas countries at 2 cents a minute.
Riss sees making some deals with other small phone companies or VOIP carriers where they are terminating each other’s VOIP calls for free and bypassing companies like Verizon altogether.
Not a Telephone Slammer. Brazil a local call.
Riss went to great lengths to explain that Vox Adapter Box is not at all like the telemarketing calls WPCNR, and perhaps you, dear reader, receive frequently of an evening, suggesting you can save over Verizon or AT & T.
“It’s a lot different. You can only use it if you have broadband. It really is a lot less expensive. It’s feature-rich. You can have up to five numbers ringing at one time. You can take the Voxbox you buy off the shelf, take it to Brazil, and if anyone is calling you from White Plains, and you’re in Brazil, it’s still a local phone call for them because it’s ringing in Brazil. In that instance, it works somewhat like a cellphone.”
Could be the Start of Something Big.
Riss said he has no stores in White Plains selling the box yet, but does have a store in Connecticut. He has also had fifteen consumers in the testing of it:
“We’re just rolling it out. Before we sent it out to the stores we put fifteen people on it that we know and love to make sure everything works and that they were happy with it. And we have several people who are just loving it. We had one person who had Verizon DSL having problems with it because Verizon DSL blocked the VOIP calls, until we programmed in the user name and password for that person. We had to program that into the box. We’ve never had anyone with cable having a problem.”
Riss’s company is located in White Plains, and is traded over the counter, and is growing. It increased the number of lines it is serving by 59% at the end of its Third Quarter, and that 59% increase was achieved in three months. The company billing is at $1 Million a month and growing almost doubling its business from last May, when its monthly billings stood at $587,000. Riss also reports the company has been making an operating profit the last six quarters. It operates eLEC Communications and New Rochelle Telephone.
Riss invites friends and neighbors to try his service, mention the CitizeNetReporter, and receive his Voice Adapter Box Free to try the service and the savings.
Riss notes that the Wall Street Journal quoted a research report predicting that the 100,000 persons who use VoIP presently will grow to 10 Million people in three years.
For more information, go to eLEC Communications website for its Voice Adaptor Box at www.myvox.net, or to order a box directly to hook up and try Voice Over Internet Protocol. The box, Riss says comes with an unconditional guarantee and will be replaced if ever defective, at no charge. The company can be reached at 1-800-VOX1699.
