Roamware Eliminates Roaming Voicemail Charges for European Operators

A new EU regulation that comes into effect on July 1, 2010 will prohibit operators from charging roaming customers for redirecting calls into voicemail while on a visiting network. The EU regulation aims to ensure that subscribers are not charged an additional fee for receiving voicemail messages while abroad. Subscribers are frequently charged for two international call legs for receiving voicemail in a different country as the call is first directed from the home network to the visited location and then back to home network where the voicemail is located.


Roamware estimates that European operators will collectively incur an annual cost of between euro 130m and euro 150m for re-bounding international voicemail calls, known in the telecoms industry as 'tromboning'.


To reduce the costs of tromboning, Roamware has introduced its patented solution, Voicemail Call Completion (VMCC), and is working with European mobile operators on its deployment. The company said that 40 mobile operators have implemented its solution so far.
"The EU's fundamental issue was that roamers could not exercise discretion in accepting voicemail messages, unlike a phone call which they can refuse to answer. Using Roamware's enhanced Voicemail Call Completion service in the home network, the Roamware software recognizes when the customer is not available to answer a call and deposits it into voicemail without the call ever leaving the home country and incurring roaming charges," said John Jiang, CTO and EVP - Product Management at Roamware.


Roamware is headquartered in San Jose with operations in Brussels, Bangalore, Mumbai, New Delhi Singapore, Dublin, Johannesburg, Amman and Hong Kong.
http://www.roamware.com