Doubling Down, Unified Office Awarded Second Patent for Voice, IoT, and Other RTC Communications Technologies

Doubling Down, Unified Office Awarded Second Patent for Voice, IoT, and Other RTC Communications Technologies

By Arti Loftus

At the intersection of voice and data, and at the inflection point of dramatic growth in IoT networking, Unified Office, a New Hampshire-based technology company who continues to defy traditional thinking, today announced it has been granted a second U.S. patent covering routing technologies.

The Nashua managed services provider, which offers hybrid cloud-based business communications services, IoT services, and data analytics described their design patent as one which covers “a Method and Apparatus for routing voice calls over voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) networks.”

Unified Office’s Highest Quality Routing Protocol (HQRP) transmission network solves for quality and reliability problems inherent with Cloud-based VoIP/UC offerings. The company said in a press release the solution “eliminates the need for costly dedicated T1 access lines, MPLS tunnels and other expensive legacy techniques that are typically used to try to create quality and reliability.”

In 2018, Unified Office received the first patent for its HQRP transmission network. This second patent further expands on that patent to include the entire end-to-end network architecture.

“Our HQRP™ network platform introduces an entirely new way of creating highly reliable, high quality, real-time business communications over broadband networks that are radically different from using standard T1 and MPLS circuits and other expensive legacy techniques,” said Ray Pasquale, Founder & CEO of Unified Office. “We are gratified to have been awarded a second patent from the US Patent Office on our platform. This further strengthens Unified Offices’ position in the marketplace as an innovator and proven technology leader in our mission to transform voice communications into a business analytics and revenue enhancement platform for our expanding customer base."

“We saw the need for HQRP™ because most SMBs are struggling to find ways to replace their undifferentiated, outdated, expensive unified communications (UC) and VoIP services as well as costly PBX equipment and accompanying T1 and MPLS circuits,” said Tom Phelan, CTO of Unified Office. “Finding innovative ways to help businesses cope in a pragmatic and practical way with the rapid pace of technological and behavioral changes in our world is what we do best.”

Unified Office’s previously patented Visual Performance Suite provides a real-time view of changes in operational performance levels and actionable intelligence for SMBs, enabling them to stay on top of real-time business performance, to take immediate actions, and to apply continuous operational improvements. These services are designed to help businesses provide higher levels of customer satisfaction, increased customer retention, and in many cases increased revenues and profitability.

We caught up with Pasquale and posed questions regarding the positioning of Unified Office and their patented technologies in the context of a rapidly evolving and fast-paced world of real-time communications networks disruption.

Where does Unified Office fit into the sprawling and complicated world of SD-WAN?

Our entire HQRP transmission network and service layers are “software-defined.”   We also use SD-WAN for customer premise redundancy when we can’t acquire a good LTE signal. SD-WAN is generally more expensive however for our SMB customers for business continuity, so we have developed our own algorithms and methods for accomplishing this. 

How do you define the difference between SD-WAN and SDN?

SD-WAN vs SDN in my mind is largely a collection of confusing definitions. SDN in the sense that I tend to agree with is something we’ve done for years both at Sonus and here at Unified Office. Essentially by separating the service routing logic and network intelligence from discrete hardware components one really increases the flexibility of control functions and creates an agile environment where changes can be managed much more efficiently.

SD-WAN in my mind tends to be more about transport independence than anything else. The ability to create WANs utilizing an array of various transport technologies creates a lot of flexibility but costs can be somewhat expensive. Again, we tend to use SD WAN techniques for business continuity when we can’t isolate or find adequate LTE signal strength. Carrier Ethernet in some markets are price competitive along with IPDSL as well.

Does this patent apply only to VoIP or any/all IP applications (like IoT)?

This patent applies to the base transmission layer upon which all of our service layers run.

What is your go-to-market? Direct or through channel resellers and VARs?

We implement a hybrid strategy which is essentially a mix of channels that can be used for fulfillment and installation as well as support. Traditional channel resellers that have grown up with legacy are quite challenged to change and adapt to the new world that we live in. I’m not suggesting they can’t change. Some are trying but by and large, it’s a difficult transition for many.

How many clients do you have today?

We have over 1,000 customers today around the country and soon international, constituting on average of over 40,000 users on our services and growing rapidly.

In which industries?

We are vertical market focused. Our current main areas of focus at the moment are the hospitality, automotive and healthcare markets.

Now that you have received the patent how do you plan to leverage it to grow your business?

It really defines our SDN transmission network layer platform that enables us to offer a variety of layered services such as VoIP/UC communications for example with the same quality and reliability that the PSTN used to offer without having to resort to using legacy techniques like circuits (T1, MPLS, etc.). This layer supports all of our other over the top value-added service layers as well such as our IoT service layer.

Who are your technology ecosystem partners?

We make extensive use of virtualization using partners such as Rackspace, Digital Ocean, Bandwidth.com and so on. We use various sensor vendors for our IoT platform which tends to be a highly fragmented market.

Thoughts on mobile VoIP, vision for 5G?

I’m not sure what you mean about mobile VoIP but if you’re talking about VoLTE for example and or Wi-Fi calling, the providers have a long way to go here to make it scalable and reliable.

I think 5G is going to suffer from the challenges of scale such as cost and regulatory challenges. Deploying thousands of small cells throughout the country is no small task and will take years for true 5G to become ubiquitous.


Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.

Edited by Maurice Nagle
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