TelePassport leads communication market

Most managers in Namibia will probably admit to the awful truth - that they spend a lot of time stamping out the abuse of company telephones by staff. Government in all likelihood has an even bigger problem. A private office with a door and a telephone must rank among white-collar Namibia's most prized possessions. Given this abuse and the high cost of telecommunications in Namibia's still-to-be-liberalised telecoms market, you would have thought that the Namibian market is ripe for the services of Telepassport.

Telepassport offers a variety of services to companies that allow them to manage their telecommunications more effectively, thereby bringing down the cost of doing business. The company was established in 2005 by Phillip Stier who is the managing director with a staff seven strong. "We're a truly Namibian company," says Stier who, along with technical director Klaus Bartsch, started the company based on his experience of Telepassport in South Africa when he acted as its sales manager in Cape Town. Gunter Hellinghausen, as well as three BEE partners - Penda Kiiyala, Ananias Martin, and Theofelus Mberirua - have since come on board which means Namibian individuals own 51% of the company. The remaining 49% is owned by a "strategic partner", Telepassport of South Africa, which provided much of the upfront capital to get the company off the ground in Namibia and allowed Namibia to benefit from the 14 years of experience gained in the more competitive South African market.

Routing for business

Telepassport started life in South Africa back in the pre-cellular days of 1993 as the first of the so-called "call-back" companies to enter the market there. These companies exploited the fact that international calls from the US were a good deal cheaper than from South Africa itself. By calling a special number provided by the call-back company, telephone users could make international calls for some 40% less than the standard call via the state monopoly Telkom. However, making use of the service was far from straightforward. Customers had to call the number of the switch that sat in New York, wait for the dial tone, put the receiver down, wait for the switch to make contact with the international number required and wait to be called back before being able to talk to the person being called. Not only were there technical problems arising from the type of phones then in use in South Africa, but people generally found the whole business too user unfriendly. And the call-back companies got up everyone's noses in an industry not used to competition, including Telkom which decided to take them to court claiming that what they were doing was illegal.

Telkom eventually lost the case but the advent of cellular telephones changed the whole telecoms landscape and with it the opportunities available to companies such as Telepassport to start offering a new service called Least Cost Routing (LCR). LCR allows companies to reduce their telephone bills by eliminating the need to cross from the fixed-line network to the cellular network when dialling between 061 and 081 numbers. This crossing between networks costs telephone users money because each time it happens MTC has to pay Telecom a fee. By installing a device (a "premier cell") fitted with a SIM card in a company's PABX switchboard, 081 calls are directed straight onto MTC's network eliminating the need to switch from one network to the other. This alone can reduce calls by a guaranteed 35% with all the revenue from the call going to MTC rather than having to be shared with Telecom. LCR is aimed at companies spending at least N$1,500 a month on cellular calls. Telepassport does not charge clients connection or user fees for the service it supplies. Instead its income stream is generated from the discount it receives from MTC as a "reseller" of cellular calls.

More than just LCR

But Telepassport's services no longer begin and end with LCR but are increasingly aimed at providing a comprehensive telecoms service. Billing is done electronically and an up-to-date statement is available at all times on the Internet which means all clients can analyse their bills directly themselves. The top 30 numbers called appear automatically in a separate report where all calls are clearly identified and their cost as a percentage of the total bill calculated. All this extra information helps companies pin down who is calling whom and for how long. Telepassport is rapidly expanding the number of "telephone management services" it can offer clients in their war against telephone costs targeted particularly at those telephone abusers among us. Telepassport can help reduce bills in three ways: by helping to track and cut out unnecessary calls, by helping companies convert expensive voice communication to more efficient mediums such as sms messaging as well as by paying the lowest rate for each call using LCR. So many messages companies want to send - such as confirming the date of a meeting or the receipt of an email - can be done at far lower cost than by making an expensive voice call. Using specially downloaded software from www.texsms.com, which works together with Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, clients can now send sms messages from their personal computers to other people's cellphones. All this new technology has allowed some companies to go as far as giving employees a monthly phone budget within which to work in order to bring down costs. insight can only imagine the uproar this would cause in its own office not to mention the self-control it would require. We're talking about changing a whole phone culture here.

The extremely polite and neatly-dressed Stier is keen to stress that things have come a long way since the cowboy days of call-back in the early 1990s. Gone apparently are the days when a company like Telepassport might have been seen as a threat by the established monopolies. In Namibia's still unliberalised telecoms market, Telepassport enjoys close cooperation with both Telecom and MTC despite the fact that it reduces revenue to Telecom. "We reduce Telecom's profits but we also stimulate the telecoms market and lead to new revenue too," argues Stier. Formal agreements are in place with the two Namibian telecoms providers.

Having been around for 14 years in South Africa already, it looks like Telepassport is here to stay. The fundamental service it offers - finding the lowest cost way of making any call - will become more valuable even if liberalisation leads to more players and lower prices in the market because there will be more choice and therefore more combinations of routes through which to minimise costs. "The more liberal the market the better," adds Stier's ebullient colleague from South Africa, Anton Potgieter. At this stage there is only one competitor in Namibia and that is Definity. This stands in stark contrast to the South African market where there is one state-owned fixed line Telkom and three cellular providers Vodacom, Cell C and MTN as well as some 20 to 30 LCR providers.

Not surprisingly, Namibia's high-cost telecoms market seems to have embraced Telepassport with open arms. The company has just signed up its 500th corporate client after barely more than a year. So corporate telephone abusers beware! Telepassport is leading change in the way people use their phones and account for the costs of this use. The days of free calls to husbands, wives, mistresses or boyfriends at the company's or the taxpayer's expense may soon be a thing of the past.