Our History
“In this part of Norway we have been building tunnels since 1890. This gives us nearly 120 years of tunneling experience”
The Norwegian Public Road Administration
There are over 900 tunnels in Norway totaling over 750 km in length, and it was these tunnels that eventually gave birth to Norphonic in 2004. Prior to this, our founding fathers had been active with manufacturing and supplying transport customers with robust Telecommunications technology since 1997.
At the start of 2003, we reacted to requests from our customer base to develop a new SIP protocol (VoIP) telephone that would work in challenging conditions exposed to high levels of humidity, dust, vibration and extreme temperatures. We found that many competitive telephones were often unreliable which was unacceptable, as many of the locations are critical to public safety. Most other manufacturers were also using their own-developed software and hardware which prevented customers to switch providers at a later stage, without having to incur huge costs or alternatively change their entire system.
Another issue was that many manufacturers were using analogue legacy technology, making maintenance work cumbersome as it would have to happen where the actual telephone was located. This obviously impacted both downtime and service maintenance costs.
We therefore focused our attention on developing a reliable VoIP telephone based on open standard SIP technology which could work in both conventional and extremely challenging areas. The key criteria we had was that it had to be easy to install, easy to maintain, and provide low cost of ownership.
The first Norphonic VoIP Telephone was launched in 2004 and was developed in the spirit that we saw the markets moving towards: namely a unified and consistent approach to using open standards that have the functionality to interface with other communication systems, thereby reducing costs and eliminating inefficiencies of using proprietary and non-reusable solutions.
Based on experience, we believe that the market demand for our Heavy Duty VoIP telephones will continue to increase in the years to come. This is in large part due to the flexible and multi-functional features of our current solutions, which makes our VoIP telephone an ideal communication unit for voice, data as well as video.
