Global Crossing Ltd. (GLBC) announced Monday it has extended its VoIP Local Service to include four new countries in mainland Europe, enabling enterprise and carrier customers to reach a total of 25 countries worldwide and more than 500 cities across Europe. The company also announced enhancements to the service.

Global Crossing VoIP Local Service is now available in the Czech Republic, Greece, Poland and Slovakia. The service provides local origination of DID numbers from major business centers throughout Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America, offering customers a single IP connection to support IP telephony and unified communications applications.

The expanded VoIP Local Service comes at a time when Global Crossing is experiencing increasing demand for its VoIP Services. In the first quarter of this year, 3.3 billion IP interconnected minutes traversed Global Crossing’s VoIP network, representing a growth rate of 58 percent compared to the first quarter of 2008. IP Interconnected minutes represent more than 40 percent of total VoIP minutes.

To better meet this demand, the company also has enhanced its VoIP Local Service to include support for national numbers in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway and Spain. Enterprises in those countries can now use one national prefix that functions as an area code for the entire country.

Another enhancement to VoIP Local Service is the expansion of local number portability in Europe. This convenient feature, which allows customers to retain their existing numbers, is now available in Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden, as well as the United Kingdom and the United States.

Other recent enhancements to Global Crossing’s VoIP Services include a VoIP utilization statistics application available to customers via uCommand, Global Crossing’s customer-facing Web portal. This enhancement gives customers a real-time view into their SIP-based capacity utilization as well as historical trends to allow for traffic management and analysis. The enhancement also provides for capacity planning and augments based on peak utilization and average concurrent call use.

Global Crossing’s VoIP Local Services are part of its VoIP services that also includes Global Crossing VoIP Outbound; Global Crossing Toll-Free; and Global Crossing VoIP On-Net Plus, which provides customers on-net to on-net calling capabilities that support cross-protocol routing schemes and network-defined private dialing plans.