XO Communications has moved its up-market VoIP service to a nationwide platform, announcing today that its XOptions Flex package of business VoIP services is now available for businesses with up to 160 employees per location, in 50 major metropolitan markets.

The service, which enables companies with existing PBXs to add the advantages of VoIP without the capital investment of new equipment, was introduced in February in eight markets, supporting one PBX vendor, Avaya. The nationwide rollout supports a broad range of PBXs connected either to an ISDN PRI line or a digital trunk, according to Eric Hyman, senior manager of IP services at XO Communications.

“This enables businesses who might not be ready to rip out an existing PBX and replace all their phones to get the advantages of VoIP,” he said.

Chief among those advantages is dynamic bandwidth allocation, which allows companies to be constantly using available bandwidth for data rather than pre-assigning chunks of bandwidth to separate voice and data services.

“This is also a good transition strategy,” Hyman said. “Companies are able to get started using VoIP without a major capital investment and then, when their existing premises equipment is fully depreciated, they can decide to move on to an IP PBX or a hosted service or a managed service.”

XO introduced its VoIP offering a year ago, in April of 2005, and has 3000 VoIP customers to date, most of whom are supporting multiple locations, he said. With XoptionsFlex, the company’s sales force has been able to move up market into larger customers, including many with distributed sites that are well-suited to the national rollout, Hyman said.

Features include: dedicated Internet access up to 3 Megabits per second, in addition to dynamic bandwidth allocation; ‘virtually’ unlimited local and long-distance calling, up to 32 voice channels, Web hosting and on-line feature management that allows for customers to make real-time changes to services through the XO Business Center.