Mobile Viral Takes Off

Europe : The world's first ‘viral’ voice conferencing system – where participants can join, leave, re-join or involve friends and colleagues in conferences at will – has achieved an immediate success with the award of a multi-million Euro contract from one of Europe’s largest mobile operators.

The revolutionary technology, developed by text and voice expert Telsis, allows truly spontaneous conferencing without pre-booking or set-up. Anyone can start a conference at any time and invite others to join in and they, in turn can issue invitations of their own. A unique aspect of the Telsis system, this capability enables conferences to propagate organically, with each conference participant paying their own call costs. What’s more, conferences can continue for as long as any of the participants want to talk. Typically, conference calls disconnect all participants as soon as the originator hangs up but this is not the case with the Telsis system.

"This is a radical concept," says Alan Pinnegar, marketing director at Telsis, "and it means that conference calls can become virtual living events. They can start spontaneously and take on different participants covering different topics, changing and growing over time. We believe this style of conferencing will be very attractive to the youth market, to families and to business, and this early order provides a strong confirmation of that belief. We expect operators deploying the system to see an early and very positive impact on their voice revenues.”

From signing the contract to the point at which the equipment was installed took just four weeks indicating a key aspect of the Telsis customer experience - speed and ease of integration of equipment into the network, which means that payback on the network operator’s investment can begin straight away.

The system supplied under this deal is a development of Telsis' well-proven conferencing technology, which is already in use around the world. It incorporates advanced voice services platforms and controllers to deliver initially up to 160 simultaneous conferences with no degradation in audio quality. The system places minimal load on existing network infrastructure and is built to minimise the need for operational management. It automatically makes real-time checks with pre-pay control systems to ensure proposed participants have sufficient credit to take part in conferences and interacts with existing billing systems to charge each participant for their part in the conference.

The model is fundamentally more advanced than 'standard' GSM conferencing, which, among its many limitations, is complex to use due to different phone interfaces, often limits conferences to six participants, requires conference initiators to pay all call charges and doesn’t survive originator disconnect.

With its headquarters, research and production site in the UK, Telsis has sales and support operations in France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Singapore and Australia. The company offers a range of carrier-grade infrastructure platforms, including intelligent SMS Routers, IN service control points, switches and advanced IVR solutions that support a wide variety of innovative value-added text and voice services. Telsis products are in use with major fixed and mobile network operators around the world.