Phone.com Launches ProSIM – Interview with Ari Rabban

Hosted by Dave Michels and David Danto of TalkingPointz

On April 23, 2025, our CEO, Ari Rabban had the opportunity to sit down with Dave Michels and David Danto of TalkingPointz, a VoIP industry thought-leading analysis and research organization, to discuss the launch of ProSIM. ProSIM by Phone.com revolutionizes the way users can utilize their mobile devices for business purposes.

The interview explores the concept of “UCaaS Mobility 3” and how this approach offers benefits such as a native dialer experience, enterprise-grade features, and the ability to utilize the cellular voice network for both traditional mobile calls and UCaaS. Dave Michels, who coined the phrase “UCaaS Mobility 3,” describes how the VoIP industry evolved from the initial idea of mobility —a fancy version of forwarding often called “find-me-follow-me”-to dedicated VoIP apps, which are the norm today. ProSIM takes mobility to the next level by eliminating the need for VoIP calling apps while still providing all the business communication features users need.

Learn more about how ProSIM provides an exceptional mobile experience to businesses of all sizes.

Enjoy the full video or the edited transcript below.

(This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Phone.com Launches ProSIM

Introductions and Phone.com Background

David Danto: Welcome, everybody. This is David Danto. I’m here with Dave Michels. We’re both from TalkingPointz, and today we are going to have a special guest join us. It’s going to be Ari Rabban, who is the CEO of phone.com. Why are we interviewing him today? Dave?

Dave Michels: I’ve been talking a lot about this thing I call “UCaaS Mobility 3.” Now, I have to say, I think UCaaS Mobility 3 is the best name for it, but no one other than me uses that term, but I’m going to stick with it because it’s a good term, and we’ll explain what that is. But when I’ve been talking about it, I’ve been saying it’s going to be the future. All the big UCaaS providers are going to be all over this, and certainly Microsoft and Cisco have made their waves, but I said, if you’re not a big player, you’re not serious unless you’re doing this. And so fa,r I’ve been wrong. But Ari, from Phone.com (probably the best name in the business), said, “Hey, I’ve got UCaaS Mobility 3.”

He called it something else, because only I say UCaaS Mobility 3. But anyway, I said, “This is great. Let’s get on a webcast and talk about it.”

Welcome, Ari.

Ari Rabban: Hello Dave and David!

Dave Michels: Okay, well, you’ve, you’ve got a great name. And I’m not talking about ProSIM, I’m talking about Phone.com. So let’s start off there. So, how did you get that name?

Ari Rabban: I was working with Jeff Pulver, and by the way, I’m in Cape Cod now at a Jeff Pulver conference. Industry professionals are familiar with the name. Those outside the industry should know that he was one of the pioneers of the voiceover IP industry. And he founded the V conferences. Working with him, I met the individuals who purchased the domain Phone.com, led by Michael Mann, who aimed to build a business using that name. I had the idea for Unified Communications as a Service or business solutions in the cloud for small businesses. We partnered, and the rest is history.

UCaaS Mobility 3

Dave Michels: Alright, well that was early history. And current history is ProSIM. So let me just take a moment here and explain this basic concept of UCaaS Mobility 3. My basic, the basic premise is that UCaaS and Mobility have always gone together to some level. And so UCaaS Mobility one version one was basically creative call forwarding and we called it things like Find-me, Follow-Me. It was basically a very fancy form of call forwarding and it was a great solution for impound calls. It didn’t work so good for outbound, but it was a pretty good solution. That was UCaaS Mobility 1.0. UCaaS Mobility 2.0 is what most people consider normal today, which is having an app on your smartphone that allows you to make and receive business calls on your personal cell device.

It works pretty well. It was a big star during the pandemic. A lot of us worked at home and whether we had a cell phone or a laptop, we were able to make and receive calls using our apps. And that worked out just fine. It doesn’t work particularly well in a lot of situations, particularly people that are actually mobile who are driving down the interstate, going between towers and things like that doesn’t work really well. And so UCaaS Mobility 3 is the concept of putting the UCaaS service on the native SIM service, whether it be hard or soft in a cell phone and giving you a true quality of service on your UCaaS line.  And so Cisco has it, they call it WebEx go. Microsoft has it, they call it Microsoft Teams phone mobile. And now Phone.com has it. And so let’s start off with a little bit of a background on Phone.com. You are not Cisco or Microsoft, how are you different?

Ari Rabban: We punch above our weight partly because of our name. Phone.com is a service provider that focuses on the needs of small business. I would say even micro businesses, one to 10 employees. We do serve some larger accounts. We have businesses with over a hundred or 200 employees. We work, we scale, but our sweet spot and most of our customers, we have about 50,000 small businesses, accounts customers on our platform. Most of them find us online, they sign up touchless. We do have a 2.4/7 call center. We’ll support you, we’ll provide a lot of love and care. I think that’s why a lot of small business like us, it’s a full phone service in layman’s terms, a business phone service with of course all the bells and whistles of modern technology. And we want to keep ahead of the curve and this is why we are here today with our new ProSIM service.

Dave Michels: I probably got it wrong because I was all excited about UCaaS Mobility three and the enterprise space, but it’s actually the smaller businesses that are really mobile. I mean, your customer profile I imagine has a lot, including business owners and almost every employee in some cases is living on their mobile phone. Is that accurate?

Introducing ProSIM

Ari Rabban: Yeah, I think first of all, in our industry there’s a huge distinction that I think isn’t made a lot or enough between a small business America, the 20 plus million small business America that keeps America going and the enterprise world, which is of course on business level probably more interesting to most of the large competitors. And just in general, you want to attract the big businesses. Mobility is of course not the same for folks who sit in front of a desk and have a laptop all the time. They have steady WiFi or very strong broadband, they can use the laptop. We certainly all learned how to do that during the pandemic. So you don’t have to be a techie anymore to use video conferencing or what have you. But again, there are millions who need mobility and can’t rely on data for steady and important calls. And the phone is their main business tool. 

Dave Michels: So when you announced this a week ago, how do you describe it? 

Ari Rabban: So it’s a good question because there is some education to do here. Many folks, as you said, don’t even know what an eSIM is or even a SIM. They know they had the card, the slot that they use the pin to open and replace when they changed phones.

Once you put on the cover on the iPhone or the Android phone, you don’t know what’s underneath you. I was surprised to see folks even that you think they’re a little more tech savvy, didn’t know that there is no slot anymore. But the findings that we had for a long time is that the apps that we all provide as an industry get complaints because they just cannot be as good as a cellular service.

Dave Michels: Let me explain that. Your cell phone does not have what we, in the internet world called net neutrality. The cell phone has different priorities of service and they always prioritize their own services first. So the SIM service, the core service, which is telephony and messaging, have a higher quality of service and will work in a bad congestion area or between highway or handoffs, much better than the internet connection, which is what they call a best effort service. So people that are running their mobile apps, their UCaaS apps on the best effort side, find out that they have a lot of dropped calls, particularly when they’re moving around. And at some point you say, forget it, I’m just going to call you back on my cell number or just call me back on my cell because that’s going to work better. We, we’ve all experienced that. And so we just give up on the other side. So you’re putting the other side, the UCaaS concept onto a SIM card. And so the question is, how many hours does this take to explain to the customer? And then inevitably they’re going to say, yeah, but it works fine. I’ve had this conversation a few times, it works fine with my app. I don’t need your service. And so I kind of have my experience, but I want to hear how you’re doing with this. 

Ari Rabban: So first of all, besides the general curiosity and innovative aspect of what we all do and we want to offer new services, there’s demand. We have, like I said, it’s 50,000 businesses and they’re using the apps and we get complaints. It’s not working, it’s not working, there’s a problem. But at the same time, FaceTime didn’t work or WhatsApp didn’t work. In other words, it’s your data. It’s not that the app is not working. I’m not saying we’re perfect, but certainly data is an issue. So we knew that there has to be some solution. We were looking for opportunities to partner with companies that could help with eSIM and mobility technology. And eventually we found the company that we thought fit like a glove. They’re Tango Networks and great folks from Dallas.

Dave Michels: I’m still interested why you did it. So I’ve got here a banner going across the screen, some UCaaS Mobility 3 benefits, quality of service. That’s the one I talked about, native dialer. Why don’t we talk about native dialer? 

Ari Rabban:  First of all, the behavior of the customer, of a user, is that they don’t want to go to an app to make a call. You want to just use your native dialer. This is how you make a call from your iPhone or your Android phone. So check mark, now we have it. And in all other UCaaS or business phone solutions, second-line options are not available. And the second thing, which is extremely important, is that we are part of the service, not a standalone second line that you can get from any other operator. We are a business solution that has all the capabilities and the functionality of a business phone solution with recording, with extensions, with the ability to monitor the calls, with of course, compliance. So HIPAA is very important for the medical professions, there are SOC II and others for financial and other organizations, all such that if you just make a call on your mobile phone, you might not be able to do it.

Even if you’re a microbusiness, a healthcare professional, or a financial professional, you just can’t make a call like that. The functionalities related to monitoring calls are all about business. Again, you might not be a big business, but you have three or four employees. They’re more important to you than employees of a big company. When they call on their cell phone, you don’t have the leads, and you don’t have the contact information for those folks when they leave the company. It could be a plumbing business, and that plumber will receive the calls, not the business.

Saying Goodbye to the Two Phone Method

Dave Michels: I keep on meeting people that are carrying two phones around and I say, why are you carrying two phones around? And it’s always the same thing. I don’t want enterprise software on my phone. You don’t have to put enterprise software on phones with ProSIM because it’s in the SIM. And so I have it on my phone and when I make a call, it says, “hey, you want to make an outbound call, which SIM do you want to use?” And if I pick one SIM, it has that outbound phone number, it’s on that service. I didn’t pay for it, it didn’t cost me anything out of my minutes or anything like that. And if I pick the other SIM, it goes out that number. And if the business is managing things and logging things like when you’re talking to customers and stuff like that, they only see your work calls. Exactly. And so you still have your personal device without any company software. It’s to me so fricking obvious, but I need people like you to explain this to customers. 

David Danto: Let me be the Devil’s Advocate then, because if I go back to my history, when I worked for an enterprise, you had this one on my left waist and this one hanging on my right waist and this is us and this is them, and they have the ability to wipe their device. If I quit the company, but they don’t have the ability to touch my device. If I’m calling another company and getting an interview, how are you going to convince me as the user of this, that if I combine these to a single phone, that the privacy is going to exist both for the company side and if I’m calling my family or an interview at another job or something like that, how do you keep them separate? How do you convince me?

Ari Rabban: That’s essentially the question. The answer is that with our service, you can guarantee that to some extent. When you use one phone, you have your personal Gmail account and your work email. If by mistake, you use your work email to send an email to a relative or a friend, the company has it, but we all know how to distinguish because you have this, call ita Chinese wall, this is work, this is a private personal, and it’s the same device. That’s what’s happening now. You do everything that you want in your personal life with line one, and then you use line two for your business. The experience here is that of using a tool that is the most popular in the world: the iPhone or Android. You don’t need to learn UCaaS; you are using the iPhone. So, if there is education here, it’s to educate the audience about the capabilities of the iPhone, not those of any other enterprise solution. The US market, in our case, I think Europe probably is a little more advanced, but we’ll catch up with dual SIM.

Dave Michels: To answer David’s question a little more, the issue is the reason they want to be able to wipe the phone is because of all the enterprise data that is on the phone. Now, in an environment like Teams or WebEx, they can actually do that from the server. They can disable you from the server, disable your client, and they don’t need to wipe the phone. They just need to basically tell the client, not that it doesn’t have access anymore. What Ari’s doing is primarily voice oriented. And so there’s no data on the phone other than call logs and stuff. And that’s tied to the SIM. So his whole value prop is you don’t have to install software on the phone, just install the sim and then the corporate can turn that on and off. And the example that Ari said earlier about the salesman leaves and goes to a competitor and takes his phone number with them. That won’t happen anymore because they’re using their work line with Phone.com ProSIM and when they change jobs, the pro number stays with the company. So there’s no reason to wipe the phone, there’s no reason to, and there’s no reason to carry two phones and it’s cheaper for the enterprise and easier for the employee. 

What does “SMB-foucsed” look like?

So you are SMB focused, and we talked a little bit about how some of your competitors are more enterprise focused people like Dave and I talk about this all the time. SMB play, enterprise play. From your perspective, what does that really mean?

Ari Rabban: For us, the definition of small business is a little different than Goldman or Morgan Stanley. The company is small, revenue is small, and they’re not tech savvy at all. They can’t afford the IT expert, let alone an IT department. The decision maker is usually the owner, and they will decide for themselves and for the few employees they have. So, the whole sale process is entirely different when you work with an enterprise, where they have either their IT department or consultants, and they have to get various people to agree, and then they have to enforce the employees to use it. And it gets more and more complicated than I’m sure there are other decisions that they have to go through, based on compliance or whatever they would think they would need to address.

Dave Michels: We see that a lot of the environment that David and I deal with, the customer has vendor meetings lined up all morning and it’s the Amazon comes in, then Microsoft comes in, and then Salesforce comes in, et cetera. I mean, your customers don’t have that. Your customers are like, look, I’m going to give you 20 minutes here and then I got to go to the Verizon store and solve my problem. It’s like they’re totally on their own. And you’re coming in with this fairly sophisticated solution. I want to hear how customers are reacting once you get past the explanation. You’ve got, I assume you’ve sold somebody on this by now. So you’ve got some customers Tell us how that’s going.

The Locked Phones Challenge

Ari Rabban: So we’ve been testing it before we went live, which was last week. If you visit the website, it’s easy to find us; you’ll see a lot of material explaining our services. There are numerous FAQs, as well as videos and tutorials. We will continue to add and improve them. Again, there is some education on what I said earlier, specifically regarding the capabilities of your smartphone, that allows you to do that. And the second thing is just how do you install an eSIM? Again, it’s not Phone.com or enterprise software, it’s your iPhone.

There is a challenge, and probably the biggest one in the US market, is that many phones are still locked to the agreements of the carriers who fund the phones, and so on. There are over 80 million unlocked phones. It’s increasing. Of course, in many cases, you can request that the carrier unlock, but you have to educate yourself and explain. These are topics that we address and share; our staff is trained to answer them, and all the information is available. And that’s part of why small business also likes us. We love them.

Dave Michels: Now when the phone is locked, and so somebody bought their phone from Verizon and is locked to Verizon, does that usually mean that both SIM slots are locked to Verizon or just or one? 

Ari Rabban: So, it depends. First, you can always ask the carrier to unlock it, and then you can use a different SIM card. They want to make sure you stay with them. There are different ways to do it. Verizon, in many cases, after you purchase the phone, they will unlock it for you. T Mobile and AT&T are different, but in most cases, you also pay monthly fees for the phone. At some point, you can pay it off, and it gets unlocked, and then you can undoubtedly use somebody else’s service.

Dave Michels: So I would say that the United States lags the world in mobile technologies, and this is one of the reasons why United States is pretty much the only country that allows this locking phone nonsense. And you look at certain countries, particularly Scandinavia, where everything is so much more innovation going on, or even mobile World Congress, biggest trade show in the industry is not in the US. It’s in Barcelona every year. And the US it is just so far behind in so many areas of mobility. And so it’s frustrating with the locked phones. Okay, so let’s get to how you did this. So tell us about your partner. 

The Technology Partnership

Ari Rabban: So yeah, we needed a company. We come from the UCaaS space, the cloud communication industry, not the cellular mobile world. And certainly, we don’t deal with SIM cards directly, and that’s all Tango Networks does. And we partnered with them. They saw that vision and they have been a great partner. And so the eSIM technology we use comes from them. Obviously, it’s all software. There’s no hardware to deal with. It’s all automated through APIs.

You get a SIM and then you stick it in your phone or download it and you have a second line. This is a second line that’s part of an entire system behind it. And Tango is that gateway that allowed us to do that. We’re not offering a cheap phone service on a second line. It is inexpensive, but the idea is that it’s part of a business solution.

David Danto: Is it only voice services or can you get data through that second channel? 

Ari Rabban: No we don’t offer data. Our whole idea is we’re not for streaming Netflix or what have you for that, you have your primary line. We’re a secondary line. It is essentially the business service on your mobile with your cellular native experience.  You can send and receive SMS messages.

Use Cases

Dave Michels: What kind of experiences or what are you hearing from your customers about ProSIM?

Ari Rabban:  We have a few hundred users already, and I’ll give you three examples. One company is small, it’s in food delivery, for wholesale and restaurants, and has a few employees. And the owner just said they’re using our app and the services, but it’s just not as friendly when they rely on it all the time. And he wants his employees to use his phone numbers, not their own. So ProSIM was very exciting for him.

Another one is healthcare. They do senior living services, so they don’t want to use their cellular phone numbers. And now it’s like give them a few ProSIMs. It’s a small organization, it’s not one of those big operations with hundreds of employees. It’s HIPAA compliant, so they can use the second line instead of being afraid to talk to patients or to the kids of the elderly or what have you.

And the third is just a frontline worker on the go, that blue-collar person who can now just take the calls, be more relaxed, and enjoy the reliability, quality, and all the other benefits I have.

Right now, you have to be a Phone.com customer, and then you can add the ProSIM.

Dave Michels:  All right. Well, I think we’re going to end this episode, but I just want to be sure that you are explaining to your customers and to your competitors when they’re trying to figure out how to keep up with you, that you tell them it’s UCaaS Mobility 3. That’s the key here.