Saturday, September 28, 2013

France's Bouygues Telecom Offers fring OTT Service for Voice+SMS over Wi-Fi

Bouygues Telecom is using the fring Over the Top (OTT) service to provide Bouygues customers with free phone calls and SMS on Wi-Fi while abroad.


“Our customers expect high quality, low cost mobile service which, thanks to the fring service, we can now extend beyond local French cellular coverage, allowing subscribers to enjoy international communication as if they were calling from within France,” said Benoît Torloting, Head of digital & B&YOU at Bouygues Telecom. “Leveraging the fring OTT solution, we eliminate cellular network roaming charges and deliver our commitment to quality-cost competitive advantage even when our customers are travelling worldwide.”  Benoît Torloting continued, “Our World & YOU launch was a great success, with an increase in new users and substantial interest from the French market.”

“This successful offering with Bouygues Telecom demonstrates market demand for the fring Telco OTT solution, which enables telecom operators to provide their subscribers with cost-saving communications, a rich user experience and reduced churn to independent applications,” said Roy Timor-Rousso, former CEO of fring and current senior executive in GENBAND’s Multimedia Business Unit.”


Earlier this month, GENBAND announced its acquisition of fring’s Over-the-Top (OTT) mobile IP communications service for consumers. Financial terms were not disclosed. not disclosed.

The fring app, which is available for both iOS and Android, provides free mobile group video chat, 2-way video chat, voice-only calls and text chat over IP.  GENBAND will offer a white label version that will let service providers and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) compete with OTT solutions. fring reduces roaming costs for subscribers by moving voice and video sessions away from radio access networks and routing them over the Internet.

GENBAND said fring white-label solution for the consumer OTT market segment complements its NUViA white-label Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) offering.