Imagine a telephone company that pays you money to receive calls — sound like pie in the sky?
Well then you haven’t heard about Vox Telecom, the new Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) teleÂphone services, which offer a real, cut-price alternative to Telkom’s fixed-line offering.
Customers get their own 087 number and can call other 087 Vox users for free after hours. Vox customers get paid 20c a minute on incoming landline calls and 40c on cellphone calls.
Previously, VoIP was used only by tech-savvy consumers, but Vox has soft-launched a VoIP offering that is easy to use, simple to install and provides quality voice services at a saving of up to 50% of Telkom’s current rates.
Similar VoIP offerings, such as MWeb’s broadband talk, are on the market, but the appeal of these VoIP services was limited previously because of their inability to interconnect with the mobile operators and Telkom.
However, recent legislative developments have forced Telkom and South Africa’s mobile operators to interconnect with VoIP service providers and provide VoIP service providers with their own numbering system.
This means that for the first time a VoIP service can operate exactly like Telkom’s fixed lines.
Without any additional complications, consumers can enjoy the cost saving of VoIP, while still having a standard fixed-line service.
“Everybody will move to VoIP,” says Vox TeleÂcom’s chief executive, Douglas Reed. “It’s not a case of if, it’s a case of when.”
Vox Telecom is promising consumers savings of 20% on calls to cellphones, 30% to national fixed lines and 50% to international numbers.
However, it is offering severely discounted call rates to other VoIP service provider numbers and calls to other Vox subscribers range from 15c a minute to free, depending on the time of day the call is made.
All a consumer needs to set up a Vox Telecom VoIP service is an ADSL connection (see sidebar).
Vox Telecom plans to launch its VoIP services officially on October 16 and this service will cost consumers a once-off activation fee of R300 and a monthly fee of R49.
Besides offering you massive cost savings, Vox Telecom will pay you money back for every call you receive on your VoIP number.
Reed says that for every call from a Telkom landline that a subscriber receives on his or her 087 number, Vox Telecom will pay the subscriber 20c and for every call from a mobile network the subscriber will receive 40c.
This sharing of interconnect Ârevenue with customers is unheard of in the local telecoms sector, but Reed says that Vox Telecoms relies on its customers to help grow the business into a real competitor to Telkom and it is therefore prepared to share its revenue with them.
“We are not fighting an even battle in this monopoly environment,” says Reed. “Our customers have to work with us to help bring competition into the sector.”
Reed says Telkom still uses every trick in the book, such as charging a higher interconnect rate for calls to VoIP service providers than to other numbers, so it is important for VoIP service providers to give the customers every incentive to find an alternative telecoms company.
“We manage to compete by giving a percentage of revenue back to our customers,” says Reed.
Reed says Vox Telecom is positioning itself to be the real second national operator by tackling Telkom head-on.
A Price war
While broadband prices in South Africa remain artificially high, the price war between competitors is well and truly on, writes Lloyd Gedye
The latest to slash prices is Telkom, which this month cut its Do Broadband one-gigabyte package from R279 per month to R199 per month.
This resulted in a number of internet service providers also slashing their prices in an attempt to undercut Telkom’s offering.
The best available one-gigabyte ADSL package is offered by Cybersmart for R169 per month.
The next best offering is available from Web Africa at R174 per month, followed by SAINET, which sells its one-gigabyte offering at R189 per month and X-DSL whose offering retails at R193 per month.
MWeb has also announced a one-gigabyte package, which is available for R179 per month for the first six months of a 12-month contract and R219 for the last six months.
This equates to an average of R199 per month, which is exactly the same as Telkom’s offering.