Switchvox, a Digium company (www. digium.com), has launched Switchvox Hosted Edition, a virtualized IP PBX that can seamlessly transfer small-business customers to a dedicated on-site appliance. The service enables ISPs, VARs, and other service providers to provide customers with Switchvox’s fully featured IP-PBX phone system running in a virtualized environment. These providers can offer small companies subscriptions to the phone system, including all the benefits of Switchvox’s on-premise solutions such as a real-time control panel, voice mail, call forwarding, and voice prompts. The hosted phone system can be seamlessly transferred to a dedicated phone server installed on premises, allowing virtual PBX providers to retain customers as they grow.

Verizon Business (www.verizonbusiness. com) has added several new features designed to increase functionality and add choice for its SIP Gateway VoIP customers. New features include foreign telephone number assignment (FTNA), the ability to assign a U.S. phone number outside the normal local calling area for that number. A new discretionary call-blocking feature gives wholesale customers the ability to designate blocking of eight specific types of calls (such as international long-distance) at the time an order is placed. Seasonal pricing and a more robust fraud detection and treatment capability have also been added.

Level 3 (www.level3.com) has announced it is launching caching and downloading services as part of its comprehensive content-delivery platform. The new architecture enables customers to tap into large-scale server clusters deployed to leverage the scale and reach of the company?s backbone, one of the largest in the United States and in Europe. Level 3?s content-delivery platform enables the acquisition and distribution of digital content from a wide variety of applications, from distributing user-generated content to broadcasting live events in HD.