This morning in the press room at ITEXPO West 2010, I was joined by Max Caponegro and Stephen Kaplan of Touchtone, a provider of IP-PBX (News - Alert) phone services based out of NJ. The two were following up on an announcement earlier this week that the company will be dropping the cost of its hosted IP-PBX phone service. This comes on the heels of the company’s unveiling of their new agent program.

The hosted PBX service, which offers customers unlimited local and long distance will now be offered at $24.99. Customers will also be given a 30 day free trial with no obligation to purchase once the time has elapsed. The company is focusing on the SMB market offering reasonably priced high-quality communications solutions.

“We’re really focused mostly on small and medium businesses,” Caponegro said. He indicated that the price point and quality of service of the TouchTone (News - Alert) service may not be a match for anything on the level of a call or contact center, but is perfect for telephony needs of this size.

Once they’ve signed up, customers have the options to use their own IP-enabled phones or purchase TouchTone phones. These phones have been integrated with the network and offer easy plug and play set up. “We’re really all about making it as easy and simple as possible, you literally just plug it in and you’re good to go.”

IP connections offer a number of amenities for the average business including unification, direct inward dialing, and hunting, a service that allows calls to be routed to several different phone lines at once. On top of these premium services customer will have access to built-in features like call forwarding, conferencing, extensions service, voicemail and hold music.

TouchTone also offers long distance switch service at competitive rates in comparison to most POTS. “Many have steadily raised rates over the past several years, and there are a lot of businesses that aren’t even looking into hosted IP,” Kaplan said.

The rate decrease will hopefully attract more of those companies who are looking for cheaper and more reliable hosted IP solutions.