Iristel, a Canadian company that is a global telecommunications service provider, has set up operations in Kenya.
“Iristel’s voice service offers an expansive, facilities-based local telephone number coverage and inbound voice origination service that enables over-the-top (OTT) and voice service providers the ability to offer innovative voice and messaging (SMS) services to their business or consumer end users,” a statement from the company says.
“This wholesale service aggregates all calls to Iristel-managed telephone numbers and hands it off to a single or multiple customer IP addresses. Iristel customers use this service to deploy next-gen primary line voice services to consumers, augment their toll-free numbers with more cost-effective local numbers that also provide a local touch or create new mobile or OTT-based applications for consumers. Iristel’s voice service is unique in that it offers service providers with near-ubiquitous local service reach, network scale and routing flexibility.”
Those are many words to say that it offers internet-based calling and texting services.
Iristel’s entry into the Kenyan market is likely to rattle market leader Safaricom, which had sought to stall such plans but the Communications and Multimedia Appeals Tribunal struck out its case. This was after the Communications Authority of Kenya, the industry regulator, had also dismissed Safaricom’s case earlier on.
Safaricom, according to the Business Daily, had voiced fears that Iristel’s local subsidiary could engage in SIM boxing activities.
“For this initial rollout of our global expansion, we will provide the capability to purchase SIP trunks, which can be aggregated with our onnet footprint, and DIDs,” says Iristel.
For the uninitiated, “Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking is a service offered by a communications service provider that uses the protocol to provision voice over IP (VoIP) connectivity between an on-premises phone system and the public switched telephone network (PSTN). SIP is used for call establishment, management and teardown,” per TechTarget.
Safaricom, Airtel Kenya, Telkom Kenya and many other companies that may not be in the daily public eye offer similar services to their (mostly) enterprise customers.
It remains to be seen what impact, if any, Iristel’s entry into the Kenyan market, its first in Africa, will have on existing players.
