MWC: Truphone launches roaming MVNO

For more news from Mobile World Congress, see Telephony’s MWC topic page

As promised, Truphone unveiled its unique take on the virtual network operator (MVNO) today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, announcing a multi-country single-SIM-card service that combines local calling plans, international local numbers and Truphone’s international VoIP network to create a service that allows customers to make calls to, received calls from and roam foreign countries on the cheap.

Truphone was short on many of the details of the service, called Truphone Local Anywhere, namely which countries would be supported and who its carrier partners would be, but the company promised all would be revealed when the service officially launches later this year. The essence of the business model, however, is to make every call a local call, whether made by the Truphone customer or made by someone contacting a Truphone customer.

Truphone is either partnering in various countries with operators to offer its service or, in cases where no operator bites, forming a true MVNO relationship with local operators, in which Truphone becomes the service provider of record. Through those relationships, Truphone will not only offer customers a local number in their home countries but in countries they may visit often or in which they have lots of contacts. When a Truphone customer dials an international number, the software client on the phone instead automatically dials a local number, which connects the call to one of Truphone’s growing network of session initiation protocol (SIP) gateways. From there the call is offloaded onto Truphone’s global VoIP network, from which it is terminated locally at its destination. This aspect of the service is basically its Truphone Anywhere platform, which it offers today over Nokia S60 and RIM BlackBerry devices.

At the other end, someone calling a Truphone customer in another country would dial the customer’s personal local number, which would connect through the same IP infrastructure to wherever the Truphone customer might be. The same scenarios would also work if a customer is roaming in a foreign country, so long as it’s a country where Truphone has a carrier partner. A call would be automatically routed through the partner carrier’s local network to the VoIP network, and a call made to a roaming customer would be intercepted locally and routed via IP to the local network, where it would be terminated as a local call.

The principle behind this mish-mash of different VoIP services is at odds with those of the typical carrier, Truphone Americas president Tom Carter said last month discussing the MVNO launch. Instead of trying to find ways to make a call more expensive, Truphone’s service was focused on exploring all the alternatives for routing a call and automatically selecting the cheapest one. “We’ll be able to provide a variety of access alternatives for our customers, but we’ll be able to optimize [each call] for the lowest cost service,” Carter said. “Customers won’t even have to think about it.”

But by becoming a direct service provider, albeit a virtual one, Truphone will be dealing with a different business model. Truphone has always piggybacked its services over other operators’ infrastructure, starting out with WiFi hotspots and moving onto operators’ local calling networks. It collects revenue by selling low-cost long-distance minutes to its customers. Reborn as an MVNO, though, Truphone will be selling minute plans, collecting local termination fees and selling phone numbers. It will even be offering data plans and SMS. Those services may cause conflicts with its original business model, which emphasized bypassing the carrier’s network entirely by using WiFi to initiate VoIP calls and messaging.

Related Articles

Truphone to launch MVNO at Mobile World Congress