At a time when telecom operators are mulling of levying charges for calls over the Internet, serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia has launched an app that lowers international call costs by up to 90 per cent.
The app – Ringo – is the second disruptive telecom technology launched by Turakhia. The first was an enterprise chat app Flock. Both Flock and Ringo are part of Turakhia’s start-up Riva, which was launched in 2013.
“We haven’t had many innovations on the telecom front during the last few years, and now we believe that there is a lot of scope for innovations in this space. In this country, reliable internet connectivity that can support Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calling is still far away,” said Bhavin Turakhia, CEO of Ringo.
Turakhia is also the Chief Executive Officer of Directi, a Web products development company he founded in 1998. In January last year, Directi sold some of its brands – ResellerClub, LogicBoxes and BigRock – to Endurance International Group.
Ringo does not require Wi-Fi, internet or carrier minutes, but uses a call flow algorithm to convert international calls into local ones.
How it works For example, when a user from India calls someone in the UK, it will dial a local call to the Indian user and another local call to the UK user and connect the two over reliable carrier circuits, Turakhia said, explaining the technology behind the application.
Ringo buys billions of telecom minutes in bulk from operators through indirect tie-ups with aggregators.
“We are using carrier’s time, but not that of the user’s operator. This helps in lowering of costs at the user’s end,” he added. Ringo, which is already operational across 16 countries, can be downloaded for iOS, Android and Windows smartphones. Across the globe, it has 1.70 lakh registered users.
In 2012, about 20 billion international voice minutes originated in India, which represents about 4 per cent of the global ISD traffic.
This makes India the fourth-largest originator of ISD calls in the world, after the US, the UK and Germany, according to a study by market research and consulting firm Telegeography.
“India is a complete underserved market, and there is a huge opportunity,” Turakhia said.