Telecoms service company Storm's Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VOIP) tie-up with data services provider BCSnet takes Storm one step closer to becoming a fully-fledged telecommunications utility, says Tim Parsonson, Storm joint-CEO.
Announced today, the two-year deal entails Storm supplying its VOIP offering to BCSnet, which will resell the offering to its own clients.
"It is a wholesale/retail relationship. Basically we just have one more hurdle to pass and that is owning our own infrastructure," Parsonson says.
BCSnet has a value-added network service (VANS) licence, which in terms of the liberalisation announcement allows it to resell spare capacity and to offer VOIP services to its clients.
The first BCSnet customer to use the Storm VOIP service, a large retail chain, has just gone live and another five of its clients will be piloting the service shortly.
Parsonson says Storm will directly support the BCSnet customers through the installation of the gateways needed, and will run a contact center in support of it.
According to the two companies, BCSnet's customers should save between 30% and 60% on local, national and international calls.
"Telkom will definitely lose some revenue through this deal. We will still buy certain services from them and we may even have to buy more bandwidth from them, but they will definitely see a fall in their revenue," says BCSnet CEO Ismail Sali-Ameen.
Parsonson says Storm has obtained legal opinion about the deal and feels comfortable about the structure.
The deal means that a BCSnet customer can make a VOIP call to another BCSnet customer or to a Storm customer and vice versa, as long as they do not break out of the virtual private networks that Storm and BCSnet own.
"Very few Internet service providers have come to the market offering a service such as this. The speed to market is important and this means that BCSnet's customers will be making their savings much sooner," Parsonson says.
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