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Business Daily
The cost of calling home
00:17:28
There’s a growing market for apps helping to cut the costs of international calls
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- [00:00]
LinkedIn Ads Narrator
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- [01:20]
Matthew Kenyon
You're with Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Matthew Kenyon and today we're talking about calling home.
- [01:27]
Kalkidan Mulugeta
Being able to touch base with my parents, with my siblings, with my close friends meant everything to me.
- [01:35]
Matthew Kenyon
Keeping in touch when you live thousands of miles away, especially if your loved ones don't have a reliable Internet connection is important, difficult and expensive.
- [01:44]
Hans Osnebrucher
At the end of the day, international calling is for telcos, a milking cow,
- [01:49]
Matthew Kenyon
which is why there's a proliferation of apps aimed at bridging the gap. Using the Internet to reduce the costs of an international conversation, but still allowing calls to landlines and basic mobiles. And it's not just about the calling.
- [02:03]
Olusei Akini Boson
Integration is a huge challenge. All cultures face that problem, but we are very aware of the ones faced
- [02:11]
Matthew Kenyon
by Africans staying connected across Africa, Europe and beyond. On Business Daily from the BBC. Nigerian entrepreneur Ole Shei Akini Boson lives in the Hague and he's checking in with his mum back home.
- [02:33]
Olusei Akini Boson
Hello, mommy.
- [02:41]
Matthew Kenyon
He's not making a regular international call and he's not using WhatsApp or FaceTime because his mother doesn't have reliable mobile Internet. Instead. Instead, he's using an app that he developed himself. Yes, I'm hearing you well, it's very
- [02:58]
Hans Osnebrucher
clear, very clear that's good.
- [03:01]
Matthew Kenyon
The app is called Froggy Talk. More on the name later. And it's one of a growing number of services aimed particularly at African expats and diaspora communities living elsewhere in the world.
- [03:13]
Olusei Akini Boson
The whole concept started from experiences that I faced trying to survive in the Netherlands. We really want to solve the connection issues that Africans especially face when they come abroad.
- [03:29]
Matthew Kenyon
Contacting his friends was difficult because they were working and calling family was expensive because they didn't have a reliable data connection. So Olusei developed his app to allow users to initiate a call through the Internet, avoiding expensive roaming charges, but still reach anyone who has a simple phone number. It's actually technology that's been around for a couple of decades and there are of course, other players in the market.
- [03:56]
Hans Osnebrucher
My name is Hans ossenrechen. I'm the CEO and founder of Torq360, the easiest calling app in the world to make reliable, affordable calls to any offline phone number. With a WhatsApp phone call, I'm on the line, you're online. So there's no physical infrastructure, so you can do it for free. With us, only the caller is online. So regardless of where you're calling from, you call to our service somewhere in the world. Our service sends you through the offline channel towards the end user, which can be a landline or a mobile phone number. So the big saving is in the first leg, as they say, that it doesn't matter where you're calling from. So in any case, there are no roaming chargers. So that of course already helps a lot. And the second thing is, as we are an app, app only or web based, you can also call via our website. We don't have the physical infrastructure that the telco has. Where the magic is, is making sure you have multiple ways to get to that same Zimbabwean econet end station. And so there's a whole world of wholesalers which we literally per call check which wholesaler will have the best chance of providing the best quality. After that, of course, we look at the price. But first quality, because just like you said, people rely on us. A call is expensive. With us you save 80%, but it's still expensive. So that's painful if you have a very limited income. So we really had to make sure we would support all the relevant local currencies that nobody did. We started with that, making sure we were supporting low denominations so from like €50 cents instead of from packages from €10 or $10, and making sure we supporting local payment methods and especially vouchers, ATMs and local wallets, like M Pesa in East Africa, Fari in Egypt, those kind of methods. And we really brought it to the streets of Joburg and that was hard work.
- [06:09]
Matthew Kenyon
So from a user point of view, someone in Joburg who wishes to call Harare and using your app, they need credit. They get the credit in the same way as they buy MTN credit at a kiosk or whatever, correct?
- [06:24]
Hans Osnebrucher
Exactly the same. So everywhere they can buy their MTN credit or can buy their local bread, we are available. It's really from every street hawker to supermarket to atm, we're everywhere.
- [06:42]
Matthew Kenyon
Calling, says Hans Osnebrucher is the core of Talk360's operation. His view of growth is to offer more ways for people to access that simple service, for example, through a banking or remittance app. But for Froggy Talk's Oloche Akini Bosen, it's the other way round. His ambitions lie well beyond facilitating conversations.
- [07:07]
Olusei Akini Boson
I know that getting into a new society, a new flow of things, away from your family and friends, away from the conversations, the gossips, the updates that you got regularly when you were back home, it does have a negative number on your well being. We don't approach our customers as Africans. We approach them specifically by their culture. And this is something that we're doing very differently. From curating the app to be to be available in the local languages to having localized support so you have people who they can talk to, people who understand their culture, people who speak the different African languages. With regards to integration, we have now commenced building an AI solution. And basically what we are trying to do is we're trying to hold the hands of anyone who uses our app and walk them through how they can go from being foreigners to fully integrated once they are in Europe.
- [08:11]
Matthew Kenyon
These are ideas that you from experience know are important and undeniably would be helpful for someone who moves like you did from Nigeria here to the Netherlands, you're also a business and you've got investors now and you've got your friends and family who've put their money in not and your money not least as well. So how do you monetize that to be able to make a profit, be able to pay back your investors and keep the business going whilst providing these services which sound quite costly.
- [08:43]
Olusei Akini Boson
Today we charge only the users of the service. We charge them for what they use, pay as you go, they fund their wallets and they have that balance available to them until they use it. With time, we would implement new business models where obviously subscription comes into play and also being able to collect some fees from service providers that would benefit from the traffic that we bring their way.
- [09:10]
Matthew Kenyon
Olusei's plans are centred around Europe and the us, at least to start with. But he says the demand is worldwide, as he discovered in the first weeks after FroggyTalk went live.
- [09:21]
Olusei Akini Boson
Definitely Libya was a place we started. The first set of users FroggyTalk had were in Libya and the need is as much now as it was back then. The challenges with the infrastructure out there were limiting factors. We do hope at some point in time we can go back and make sure that we impact the lives of the one million plus or so African migrants who pass through Libya. But people out there struggle with having the right access to infrastructure to allow them to pay for services online. But it doesn't mean they don't, you know, they don't need or they don't deserve good services. And we will get there, but we first, you know, our paying customers, the markets where we are thriving right now, we want to make sure that we strengthen our foothold before looking elsewhere.
- [10:17]
Matthew Kenyon
You're with Business daily from the BBC World Service.
- [10:22]
LinkedIn Ads Narrator
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- [11:02]
Howie Mandel
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- [11:34]
Matthew Kenyon
I'm Matthew Kenyon looking at the world of apps aimed at expats and helping them keep in touch with home. The core of that service is cheaper Calling allowing a user who has Internet access to cut the costs of an international call to a landline or a mobile that doesn't have any data, which rules out services like WhatsApp or FaceTime. The obvious question to anyone like Hans Osnabrucker of Talk360, who's running a business based on people's limited access to the Internet, is won't everyone soon be online?
- [12:09]
Hans Osnebrucher
I always love this question.
- [12:12]
Matthew Kenyon
You have an answer?
- [12:12]
Hans Osnebrucher
Yeah, I know. It's always a bit of the question, when is this obsolete? Yeah. We also thought at some point the whole world has a perfect place with the fantastic Internet, etc. The facts are unfortunately a bit differently. Then of course there's GSMA reports that for example, for Africa in 2030, half of the continent will have mobile Internet, which is great, but there's still 750 million who don't have that. Unfortunately, it's not that they have the same as you and me, 24 hours per day, fantastic Internet. No, it says that they could have access to Internet. For example, the Nigerian community, which is one of the largest of, I think it's the largest African diaspora of across the world. So also for us, it's one of our top three destinations. Every year we have more people from Nigeria using our service. And every year we see that they slightly call less minutes into less people. So one is the confirmation of the trend that more people that are calling will have sometimes Internet, but still there will be a lot of people there also the next 20 years they need to rely on services like this.
- [13:23]
Matthew Kenyon
What's more, just because people have access to the Internet now, doesn't mean they can rely on it in the future.
- [13:30]
Hans Osnebrucher
As soon as within a country, the Internet gets shut down, which happens more than you would think, I think is every month somewhere in the world, a government shuts down the Internet for one or two or three days or even a week. So we immediately see then spikes from all over the world, people registering trying to call that country. Now of course, for us, we have the fantastic solution for that. However, when there's real trouble in a country, they also shut down wholly or partially the capability to call. It can really be like 20,000 people a day registrating from all over the world just to call their loved ones. So yeah, we do see that immediately in our data. If there's trouble in a country, we see it.
- [14:18]
Matthew Kenyon
Hans Osnebrucher of callingApp Talk 360. So how does this market look from outside Europe? Time for me to make a call to Ethiopia.
- [14:35]
Kalkidan Mulugeta
Morning Matthew.
- [14:36]
Matthew Kenyon
Hi, Kalkeedun. Good morning. How are you?
- [14:39]
Kalkidan Mulugeta
I'm doing well, how are you?
- [14:41]
Matthew Kenyon
Yeah, I'm very well, thank you very much.
- [14:44]
Kalkidan Mulugeta
So my name is Kalkiden Modugeta. I run a company here in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, called Clear Skies Technology, and our work intersects technology and telecoms.
- [14:57]
Matthew Kenyon
I should say we were talking on WhatsApp because we both had access to strong Internet. But says Kalkeedan, despite the huge growth in access to data, there are still millions of people who don't have that luxury.
- [15:10]
Kalkidan Mulugeta
When I was a student back in the day and I was based in the United States, we used to use a calling card called vip. And what that would do was it would go straight from our phones to mostly feature phones back home. And so it's been interesting to see the revolution of that. I think about 10 years ago we had the rise of Viber in the diaspora to call folks back home. And largely now it's WhatsApp. But like you said, smartphone penetration has grown significantly. But for our population of 125 million people, roughly, not everyone has access to a smartphone or even a feature phone.
- [15:53]
Matthew Kenyon
And a feature phone is what you might call either an old fashioned Nokia or indeed a landline.
- [15:59]
Kalkidan Mulugeta
Yeah, so when we talk about feature phones, we talk about phones essentially that aren't connected to the Internet, where the basic features are voice and sms.
- [16:10]
Matthew Kenyon
This idea of an app that fills the space where you can connect from one side on the Internet and the last leg of the call goes through the traditional infrastructure. From your point of view, how big a part of the communications market is that?
- [16:26]
Kalkidan Mulugeta
So if we're to just do the math right? Ethio Telecom boasts about 80 million customers. Safaricom does 10 million of that. About 40 million are smartphone users or have access to the Internet. So we're saying about half of them use mostly feature phones or traditional phones. And by the way, there's still people who have smartphones, but due to their level of comfort using apps or their level of digital literacy, they'll still opt to be called directly on their phone as opposed to using WhatsApp.
- [17:03]
Matthew Kenyon
You yourself have lived abroad. You mentioned that. From your personal point of view, how important was it for you to be able to keep in touch with, not just be able to speak to people, but also keep in touch with what's going on back home when you're living abroad?
- [17:23]
Kalkidan Mulugeta
It was everything, Matthew. I mean, being able to touch base with my parents, with my siblings, with my close friends meant everything to me. When I lived abroad, I was a student. So I remember I used to buy a $5 calling card and it would last 37 minutes. And I think they upgraded later on to 45 minutes. I still remember this fact. And you know, right at the one minute mark, it would give you like a double tone, beep, beep, saying that like, the time is almost over. And then you try and like squeeze in your last words. But by then you've made sure you've talked to like every member of the family. You've gotten dates. Sometimes you would have to go back to the store to buy another one. If, you know, if I had extra money, I'd buy a $10 card. So it meant a lot. I remember when the calling card that I used to use revolutionized and now had an online option where I could just from the comfort of my home, I could log into their website and just load up the card onto my phone and then directly call my parents. It just, it felt so revolutionary, but it felt like a cost that I had to budget. But of course, after talking to them, it was everything. Especially during holidays, during special occasions. But I have to say that the calls were always one way. It was harder for them to call me.
- [18:51]
Matthew Kenyon
Kalkidan Mulugeta of Clear Skies Technology in Addis Ababa, reflecting on on the continuing need to keep in touch with home and family, which is at the heart of the attraction of apps like froggytalk and talk360. That's just about it for this edition of Business Daily from the BBC. But before we go, there is just one more thing we need to clear up. Just why did Olusei Akini Boson call his app Froggy Talk? It's a question he's used to answering.
- [19:22]
Olusei Akini Boson
When one frog croaks, it doesn't croak alone. The others answer. You start to hear multiple croaks happening. And that was where the idea of the name came. Froggy Talk. Because then one frog croaks, the community responds and then it goes on and on.
- [19:39]
Matthew Kenyon
In other words, people need to communicate and we'll keep on finding ways to do it, whatever the obstacles we find in our way. I'm Matthew Kenyon reporting from the Netherlands. Thanks very much indeed for listening. You can hear much more from Business Daily wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
- [20:02]
Howie Mandel
Hey, it's Howie Mandel and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my How We do it gaming team take on Gilly the king and wallow. $267 million gaming in an epic global gaming league video game showdown four rounds, multiple games, one winner, plus a halftime performance by multi platinum artist Travy McCoy. Watch all the action and see who wins and advances to the championship against Neo right now@globalgamingleague.com that's globalgamingleague.com everybody games.