GENBAND Brings fring to France's Bouygues Telecom

Following up on its acquisition of fring, GENBAND announced it will be providing fring over-the-top (OTT) service to French operator Bouygues Telecom. Customers will be able to get "free" phone calls and SMS text messages on Wi-Fi while abroad. France is heating up in the OTT race, with the potential for RCS to become the next technology play in the market.

Bouygues Telecom is the third largest mobile carrier in France, with 11.3 million mobile subscribers, plus an additional 1.9 million fixed broadband customers.   It represents a significant win for GENBAND in the OTT market, coming on its acquisition of fring as a larger play to build up its services portfolio. The company is continuing its evolution away from a product company driven by hardware and software to a full-services business with offer consulting and managed solutions.

Fring provides a peer-to-peer client support for voice and video calls, chat, conferencing, and network routed calls and SMS from the PSTN. Platforms supported include all major smartphones and tablets, including the Apple iOS line, Android, and Nokia. In 2012, fring added a white-label telecom OTT offering for carriers. The company was acquired by GENBAND two weeks ago. 


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GENBAND and other firms in the telecom space believe service providers are coming around to the idea of operating white-label OTT services as a customer retention strategy against third-party players such as Microsoft's Skype and a hoard of offerings that have used IP and the Internet to bypass the PSTN, cutting into long-distance and international calling revenues.

In France, Orange – the largest carrier in the country – has gone a different route. Using a start-up approach, the carrier created the Libon OTT service to combat OTT offerings and pick up revenue. Libon, like OTT competitors, offers a free and a premium version, with support for the iPhone and Android. Calls are delivered using the open-source SILK codec, so users can get HD voice quality if they have sufficient bandwidth.

Libon has one other trick up its sleeve. Later this year, the service will become Joyn-compatible following Orange's RCS rollout in Europe, offering features such as chat and group chat, file transfer, and on-call content sharing. 

RCS (Rich Communications Services) represents the carrier answer to OTT. Designed to plug into an IMS infrastructure, RCS provides a multi-carrier OTT solution, enabling a carrier to operate its own OTT service while being able to seamlessly operate with other RCS implementations on other carrier networks.  RCS has been slowly introduced across Europe and select markets in Asia and the Middle East under the GSMA Joyn brand.

If Bouygues Telecom needs RCS, fring will be able to oblige. fring has discussed a roadmap to ensure its OTT service is compatible with RCS.