Category:Service Providers

A service provider is a business that sells telephone service. They are many ways they can deliver the service to the customer, such as POTS, VoIP, Cellular, PRI, or Satellite. Most providers speicalize in one of these. The biggest providers are "Tier-1" meaning they own and maintain telecom equipment (e.g. AT&T, Verizon, Bandwidth), while most carriers are "Tier-2" or "Tier-3", meaning they resell service from the higher tier providers, usually including their own set of features, these include bulk resale providers (e.g. BulkVS), hosted telephony services both commercially (e.g. VoIP.ms, Ooma Ringcentral, Webex) and for telephone collectors or hobby usage, and Mobile Virtual Network Operators (e.g. Tracfone Wireless & it's subsidiaries, Boost, Metro). Learn more.

Service providers include companies who provide telephone service as a service either to general public (residential, small business, enterprise customers) including (but not limited to) Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Tracfone, US Mobile, Ringcentral, Vonage, OnSIP, VoIP.ms, BulkVS, Microsoft Teams, TextNow, Google Voice, Bandwith, Comcast, Frontier, Twilio, Callcentric, Ooma, MagicJack, Anveo, British Telecom, Vodafone, Softbank, China Telecom, and Bell Canada. Or as a hobby (e.g. switching networks, community PBXes, hosted line services).

Service providers do not include internal phone systems (e.g. a pbx in business, a government phone system), or phone system manufacturers (e.g. Cisco, Nortel/Lucent/Avaya, Digium/Sangoma).