Chad
Chad's state Telco co-locates and uses VOIP

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afrol News, 24 October - Chad's state telco has signed an agreement with an international VOIP (telephone calls via the Internet) call operator for its international calls and allowed that company to co-locate its equipment alongside theirs. So what? Well Chad may be a small country in African terms but the deal shows the newly emerging pattern of internet-based international telecomms deals that will have a significant impact on internet access charges.

Société des Télécommunications Internationales du Tchad (SotelTchad), the national telephone operator in the African Republic of Chad, is using ITXC Corp's (NASDAQ: ITXC) global network to originate and terminate international long distance telephone traffic in Chad.

By co-locating ITXC's IP telephony equipment at its switch facilities, SotelTchad connects directly to ITXC.netSM. This enables SotelTchad to immediately increase traffic in and out of the country with almost no additional capital investment. 

SotelTchad receives additional income for completing calls sent by ITXC's carrier customers around the world to Chad and saves by purchasing less expensive international routes from ITXC. ITXC has a team of buyers who negotiate termination to get the most competitive rates to locations worldwide and pass this expertise on to carrier customers like SotelTchad. ITXC also isolates national carriers, like SotelTchad, from having to bill and collect from competitive carriers they do not already have relationships with.

- Connecting to ITXC.net enables us to gain traffic that comes from competitive carriers around the world that we were not previously receiving, stated General Director of SotelTchad, Ali Mahamat Zene. "That additional traffic will provide us with much-needed revenue we can use to increase teledensity here at home."

Calls traveling to and from Chad over the internet are placed and received on ordinary telephones and fax machines in the usual way. Neither the caller nor the called party needs to have or use a computer; and, since ITXC has developed sophisticated tools used to route traffic over the Internet, it provides quality that is as good or better than the legacy phone network. Callers are unaware that their calls are being routed over the Internet.

ITXC gives SotelTchad almost immediate entry into the new competitive call termination market and better margins on calls out of Chad because the Internet is the most cost-effective way to transport any form of data, including voice, anywhere in the world. ITXC has developed and patented the technology required to deliver carrier quality while benefiting from Internet economics.

- The Republic of Chad needs to extend its communications infrastructure quickly to participate in today's global economy, said Tom Evslin, ITXC Chairman and CEO. "SotelTchad recognizes that the Internet provides the perfect solution for extending the reach of its voice network. We are very pleased to have SotelTchad join the growing number of African carriers connected to ITXC.net."

Over the last four years, ITXC has built the world's largest network for routing calls over the Internet. Originally, most of these calls were placed from the US and Western Europe to people in developing nations. 

As telecom markets around the world begin to open to new technology and to competition, more and more calls are being placed in countries that had previously only received calls from ITXC. Two-way global traffic over ITXC.net increases volume on ITXC's network, increases ITXC's margins, increases revenues for terminating carriers, and provides more competitive rates to ITXC carrier customers. 

Today ITXC.net transports calls to more than 125 countries. ITXC has a growing presence in Africa and has already announced that it is interconnected with Zimbabwe PTC and most recently Telkom South Africa. 

By Russel Southwood. 

Source: This article is reproduced with special permission from Balancing Act

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