Florence Telecom is a family business that has been building its telephony expertise for three generations. We are based in the Greater Montréal area.
Before 1986
Humble beginnings
André Charbonneau, the company’s founder, works at Bell Canada. He tinkers with ways to refurbish Nortel telephones. Bell declines to see the project through, so he decides to carry it out on his own.
1986
The birth of a family business
André Charbonneau founds Récupération Florence, the first entity of what would become Florence Telecom. The company refurbishes Nortel phones to give home and office phones a second life, Norstar systems included.
Around 2000
The IP shift
The company begins offering an IP phone system based on open source software, installed at customers’ premises. It revolutionizes telephony through greatly reduced costs and flexible service.
2004
A team of 100 people
The company has about a hundred employees dedicated to refurbishing telephones.
2006
Flo-IP, our first complete platform
We design Flo-IP, the first fully featured platform we developed ourselves. It marks the start of hosted services: the system is no longer only installed at customers’ premises, it is also hosted and managed by the company.
2009
From manufacturing to services
Nortel’s bankruptcy announces the end of the world we had been working in. It forces us to adapt, improve and reinvent our services: we shift from manufacturing-related work to being a services company.
2011
The Florence Telecom brand
The Florence Telecom trademark is created. It becomes the name under which we offer our telephony services.
2016
Moving to the cloud
Cloud services arrive to meet the evolving needs of our customers.
2024
A fully remote company
We go fully remote: our team now works entirely from a distance.
Today
A complete platform, constantly evolving
Three generations later, our cloud platform brings together everything a business needs: telephony, softphones, SMS and MMS, fax, call centres and AI transcription. And it never stops moving forward: new features are added every month, so our customers always benefit from the best in telephony.
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