Why domestic
The line from Exeter Place to your desk.
Why a phone company would name itself after a boarding-house room in Boston, and why everything we do stays in the United States.
“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”
On a March evening in 1876, in a rented room at 5 Exeter Place, Alexander Graham Bell spoke into a liquid transmitter and Thomas Watson, in the next room, heard him clearly enough to come.
Nothing about the moment was glamorous. The room was a boarding house. The equipment was handmade. The sentence was a request for help. But a voice had crossed a wire for the first time, and someone on the other end had understood it.
We named the company for that room because that is still the whole job. When someone calls your front desk, your clinic, your dispatch line or your reservations desk, they expect to be heard clearly and helped promptly. Every feature we build is measured against that expectation, and so is every person we hire.
The building at Exeter Place is long gone. The standard it set is not.
What domestic means here
Everything that touches your calls is in the United States
Not a data-residency checkbox. The people, the code and the servers.
Written and maintained here
Our engineers are employees based in the United States. Fixes ship on your schedule, from people who can be reached by phone, and the code is never contracted out.
A desk you can call
1 (800) 555-0176, weekdays 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Central, with an emergency line answered around the clock. Every call is answered by a US-based engineer who can see your system while you talk.
Three US regions, nothing elsewhere
Northern Virginia, Texas and Oregon. Calls, recordings, voicemail and texts are stored encrypted in these regions and replicated only between them.
Veteran-owned and operated
The company is owned and run by a United States military veteran. That shows up in how we treat a commitment, how we treat a deadline and how we treat the person on the other end of the line.
Veteran-owned and operated
A short history of the line
From one wire to a hosted system
Each step made the call more reliable and the equipment less visible. We think of ourselves as the next one.
- 1876
The first call
Bell to Watson, one room to the next, over a single pair of wires at 5 Exeter Place.
- 1915
Coast to coast
The first transcontinental call, New York to San Francisco, with Bell and Watson once again on each end.
- 1960s to 1980s
The private branch exchange
Businesses bring switching in-house. A closet full of equipment and a maintenance contract become the price of a professional front desk.
- 1990s
PRI and digital trunks
Twenty-three calls over a single circuit. Reliable, expensive, and still tied to a box on the wall.
- 2000s
Voice over IP
Calls become data. Self-hosted systems like 3CX let anyone run a PBX, and anyone has to keep it running.
- Today
Hosted, domestic, answered
Exeter runs the system in US data centers, supports it from US desks, and leaves you with phones that work and a number to call.
Talk to the people who build it.
An engineer in the United States, on the phone, the same business day.