Vodafone Alternative - Why Telnyx is preferred in AU

There’s no denying it—Vodafone is a truly global brand. They have a large presence as a mobile phone provider in the UK, Ireland, and of course, Australia, where they are one of just three Mobile Network Operators (MNO). Traditionally, they have owned and managed their mobile network and can sell access to this network to wholesalers across the continent, but now, they are slowly dipping their toe in IP communications.

At Telnyx, we’re doing things a little differently. We own a private, global network that was purpose built for real-time, IP communications. We’re developer built, and know what your developers need from an API so that it will easily integrate into your existing systems for a seamless transition to our platform. You won’t have to mold to us, the Telnyx platform will mold to you.

Vodafone offers SIP and VoIP services through OneNet, their Unified Communications solution. But how do they stack up for your enterprise Voice needs? In this guide, we’ll take a look at differences between Telnyx and Vodafone Australia when it comes to network, price, and customer experience.

Network: Telnyx vs Vodafone

Over the years, Vodafone has invested heavily in its mobile network (a necessity - remember the Vodafail meltdowns of 2011?) and has developed a presence across all major Australian cities for 3G and 4G services. However, when it comes to internet infrastructure, it’s a different story. The rollout of the national broadband network (nbn™), means that Vodafone has the same network access as every other internet provider in Australia.

But what does this mean? The Australian government has ensured that the nbn is a wholesale-only, open access, telecoms platform that does not show preference for one provider over another. This means that customers’ media is streamed through busy public lines which increases the likelihood of packet loss, lag, and jitter leading to reduced call quality.

At Telnyx, we believe this simply isn’t good enough. That’s why we built our own global private IP network, to pull your traffic off the public web and carry the media across our own fiber. This means your packets are exposed to as few public hops as possible. By reducing the number of hops, we reduce the overhead transmission that diminishes call quality. And since your media is not competing with other media over a busy public network, there is reduced latency and every call is crystal clear.

Telnyx Global IP Network

Reliability and Guaranteed Uptime

Since Vodafone runs their voice service over the nbn and not their own private network - they have very little control when dealing with network outages. This means if there is an issue on the network that causes your connection to go down, you’ll have to contact Vodafone who will then have contact nbn to fix the issue- sounds messy, right? The bottom line- they are not in control of their network.

We searched high and low to find a guaranteed uptime service level agreement (SLA) for Vodafone in Australia, but to no avail. This SLA is absolutely critical as it defines the amount of time that a service is online and operational.

Telnyx promises five-nines of uptime SLA- that means we are online and operational 99.999% of the time. In any given month we expect to have no more than 26 seconds of downtime on our network. We guarantee this through our cloud-agnostic approach, ensuring that we never rely too heavily on one cloud provider which in turn, protects customers if there is ever a network failure.

To put that in context, Telstra (who use the same network as Vodafone) only guarantees 99.86% uptime per month. It may not seem like a whole lot less but that equates to 30 minutes or 69x more downtime per month when compared with the Telnyx network. If you think about what a 30 minute outage could do to your customer experience then you’ll see what this is a big deal.

VoIP Features

There are some basic features that every VoIP provider should offer as standard. And then there are the VoIP providers that go above and beyond. Take a look at the table and see where Vodafone and Telnyx rank.

List of Voice Features offered by Vodafone Australia and Telnyx

At Telnyx, we want you to build the exact experience you want, with more control than any alternative. That’s why we are constantly adding new features to our VoIP offering, all of which are accessible in the Mission Control Portal, so you can choose what to add to your service when you need it. For example, you can easily search for and buy numbers with emergency-capability in the portal.

Purchase Emergency-enabled Numbers in the Mission Control Portal

Vodafone’s offering is more limited. Sure, they have all the standard VoIP features you would expect from any provider- like Call Forwarding, Conferencing Calling and Call Transfer- but their service doesn’t go far beyond that. Don’t limit your business by partnering with a provider that can’t offer more than this.

Support

While we have designed our portal with ease-of-use in mind, we know you’ll run into difficulties at times. But there’s no need to worry. Telnyx has a dedicated support team that is online 24/7/365, at no extra charge no matter how big or small your minimum spend. We believe this is important to give you peace-of-mind knowing that whatever happens, whenever it happens we’ll be online and ready to help.

You can take a look at our user reviews on G2 Crowd to see the impact a well-designed network infrastructure and amazing support team can make.

With Vodafone, support isn’t so straightforward. Since Vodafone runs their voice services over the nbn, it’s not the Vodafone support team if you have a network issue, it’s the nbn support team. The nbn team is only available for support in extended business hours. That means should there be a network issue outside of this timeframe, you and your business could potentially be left in the dark for hours before it is dealt with, let alone resolved.

Pricing

In general, SIP trunking with Telnyx is priced on a ‘pay as you use’ model, with an easy-to-understand rate deck.

Telnyx Pricing (AUD)

Pricing for Vodafone’s OneNet plans varies depending on what type of plan you sign up to -premium or standard- and plan length- month to month, 24 months, or 36 months.

With Telnyx, you’ll get a full feature set as standard when you sign up to our portal. Combining our SIP Trunking and Call Control products will give you access to our full feature set. OneNet saves it’s most useful features for a premium tier, therefore we’ll look at the pricing for the premium contract for 36 months- the cheapest of the 3.

The monthly charge for one user on the premium plan is $43. Multiply that by $36 months and you’re looking at a minimum of $1548 per year for one user. On the Telnyx network, one user would have to make 74 hours worth of Outbound Mobile calls per week to rack up the same charges.

Flexibility

Telnyx and Vodafone also differ in their levels of flexibility. With Vodafone, if you sign up to a 24 or 36-month subscription and want to leave before the end date, you’ll be faced with an early termination charge. The same goes for if you see a reduction in usage or in the number of users on your account. The early termination fee is calculated as:

With Telnyx, you can down your connections when you don’t need them, without any hidden cost. We realise that business is anything but predictable, especially in 2020, and that forecasting can sometimes be a long way off. This, combined with our pricing model, means that you only pay for what you use, and we won’t penalize you for a drop in calls.

And what if your company is moving fast and breaking things? You’ll need a voice provider who is ready to scale your connections as quickly as you’re growing. Vodafone's cloud communications solution will only allow you to create and manage a maximum of 500 connections, effectively capping your growth opportunities.

At Telnyx, we want you to be primed for growth. That’s why we have no limit on the number of connections you create- the sky is your limit!

Why Developers Choose Telnyx over Vodafone

Our developers have designed an easy-to-use, self-service platform so you can add and remove take control of all your SIP connections from day 1. Buy numbers, setup connections and monitor your usage through the Mission Control Portal.

While Vodafone has also designed a user-facing portal, it doesn’t go beyond the call of duty. They have focused on serving the voice market with some added features, which is what they know best.

But Telnyx is more than just a voice provider. We realize that voice is just the tip of unified communications. That’s why our developers have built our Mission Control Portal to house everything from voice, messaging, wireless, and fax so you can have a seamless unified communications experience, whenever your business is ready to truly embrace it.

And whenever you’re ready, we want you to have a smooth transition to our platform. At Telnyx, we pride ourselves on continuously producing extensive developer documentation and informative video tutorials that are always available in our developer center.

The Telnyx Developer Center. Access configuration guides, developers docs and our Slack Community, all from one place.

We also run a developer Slack community where your developers can ask questions directly to us and other developers using the platform and get answers almost immediately.

Ready to make the switch? Sign up for a Telnyx account. Or, speak with one of our experts to discuss migration.