O-Tel Telecom announced today a major expansion of Geographic Number  options for their customers across South Africa, particularly in smaller towns.

Until now, the smaller towns were subjected to use the unpopular ‘087’ number code for their VoIP service. Many callers felt calling an 087 number is expensive, therefore avoided calling the number.

O-Tel’s current offering included the major cities codes, such as 010, 012, 021, 031, 041 and 051. This service was very popular amongst O-Tel’s partners who found that closing a VoIP deal was much easier when they offered a Geographically allocated number to their client. Now O-Tel’s partners in smaller towns, particularly the Wireless Internet Service Providers and Least Cost Routing (LCR) specialists, can benefit from the added facility. New number codes include 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 022, 023, 027, 028, 043, 044, 045, 047, 053, 054, 056, 057, and 058.

Mohammad Patel, O-Tel CEO comments: ‘Porting numbers from Telkom has kept us busy in the past few months. However, our partners have been ecstatic to be able to provide relevant geographic numbers to their clients.”

ICASA’s slow implementation in service change has not dampened the spirits of the players in the VoIP industry. With the partnership of Wireless Internet Service Providers around the country, O-Tel has found itself in a leading position where voice services can now be deployed without an ADSL backhaul facility. This enables the end-user to totally break free from Telkom.

Patel adds “There has been an uptake in VoIP Account signups since the initial service was launched late last year. Now we’ve just expanded it to the smaller towns, since O-Tel is covering majority of South Africa. Our nationwide MPLS is a great advantage for our partners who can easily backhaul high quality voice to O-Tel switches.”

2011 seems to be the year of VoIP. With major acquisitions taking place, release of stable bandwidth infrastructure, and lower interconnect rates, it is only a matter of short time that Digital Telephony overtakes the old copper technology South Africa has been using over the past few decades.

‘Telephone 2.0, here we come!’ concludes Patel.

About O-Tel Telecom

O-Tel is South Africa’s fastest growing Digital Communications Company, with an established and stable VoIP infrastructure.

O-Tel provides Private Label Services such as SIP Trunking  and Hosted PBX to WISPs, ISPs, IT Service Providers, PBX Installers, and enterprises.

O-Tel is proud to be a Licensed National Telecom Service Provider in South Africa.

For information on O-Tel’s products and services, please visit www.otelafrica.com

For media inquiries, please contact: O-Tel Press Officer, 08 000 6000 2 or  [email protected]