Talk IP and Flexfone: Building a Business Telephony Provider
I co-founded Talk IP with Thomas Fest. We resold Flexfone with our own SIP trunks, custom software, and QoS internet for Danish businesses.
I co-founded Talk IP ApS together with Thomas Fest, . Our product was Flexfone, a business telephony solution we resold with our own SIP trunking, software, and value-added services on top. The tagline was "Mød fremtidens virksomhedstelefoni."
Flexfone
Flexfone was the product we resold. It combined traditional PBX functionality with employees' mobile phones. The problem: businesses juggle direct numbers, mobile numbers, landline numbers, local numbers, and extensions. Flexfone unified all of it without complexity. We added our own SIP trunk infrastructure, custom software integrations, and QoS internet on top.
Three product lines:
SIP Trunk -- for businesses that wanted to keep their existing PBX but move to IP telephony. Replace expensive ISDN lines with SIP trunks over internet and cut costs immediately.
Cloud PBX -- a complete hosted phone system with all the flexibility of IP telephony. Updates and operations handled as part of the subscription. No hardware, no maintenance, no IT department needed.
Internet with QoS -- fiber and DSL connections with Quality of Service guarantees specifically for IP telephony. Guaranteed call quality every time, because business telephony over best-effort internet isn't good enough.
On top of the core products: IVR call flows with programmable routing, time-based rules, holiday schedules, and database-driven logic. Mobile integration so desk phones and mobiles rang simultaneously. Full call recording and CDR for compliance.
Running a telco
Thomas brought the business relationships and telecom industry knowledge. I built the platform and ran the technical operations.
Running a telco taught me operations the hard way. Carrier negotiations, number porting, regulatory compliance, billing systems, customer support for something people expect to work like a utility. Business telephony can't go down. If the phone system stops, the business stops.
Redundant SIP trunks, failover between carriers, monitoring that paged me when anything looked wrong. And the QoS internet product meant understanding traffic shaping, packet prioritization, and the real-world behavior of Danish DSL and fiber networks under load.
What it led to
I had already worked with IP telephony at scale as chief developer at Debitel, where I ran GoIP with 100,000+ private customers. Talk IP was different: smaller scale, but full ownership. At Debitel I operated someone else's platform. At Talk IP I built it from scratch with Thomas.