Interview with Bill Tam, CEO, EQO
How would you categorize various flavours of mobile VoIP?
I would say there are three main categories of mobile VoIP players. Providers like Fring I will place under voice-over-data category. Then there are players like EQO. The third type include the likes of Rebtel that predominantly provide voice only.
You are one of very few mobile VoIP players that are getting some traction. How would you compare your offering to other successful mobile VoIP plays such as Fring and iSkoot?
Like Fring we believe that VoIP is one of the capabilities but certainly not the only one in our context. The power is actually in the aggregation model services. At some point in time our paths will firmly cross but in the meantime we are offering services on top of a variety of handsets and not just the high end $400-$500 handsets.
iSkoot is very much involved in developing applications around Skype system and establishing deals with MNOs. We focus on multiple networks, the ability to connect to any type of network whether public IM or private MNO users.
Why are you not productizing your solution like others?
It defeats the whole notion of the calling experience that we enable. Licensing your platform to an MNO is no different than being able to connect to just one public IM service such as MSN. Your friends may not necessarily be on the same network or subscribe to the same MNO. That was something that we wanted to avoid specifically from the outset.
What happens when MNOs venture into mobile VoIP? Will you be able to sustain the competition?
We are talking about several years here. These things take a long time to get introduced through big players. Our model is that voice component will provide us revenue today but overtime that will be a piece of broad spectrum of services we will be providing to users. There is an ocean of communication between EQO-EQO users possible. We will be less concerned about pricing models and more involved in being able to deliver these services.
What is the applications roadmap at EQO?
Our vision has always been to provide an aggregated platform connected to multiple IM networks allowing users to communicate with all of their contacts. This year we will introduce hooks to variety of different social networks so that you can aggregate contacts from lots of different places. Apart from that we will provide capability for group sessions.
There are so many VoIP apps on social networks? Will you be able stand out in the crowd?
Social networks have taken communication to whole new level in terms of contextual communications. One of the problems we are fixing is the connectivity you are missing when you are away from your PC. On the other hand, mobile devices are not well tuned to run heavy duty social network applications. We provide a simple interface for texting or calling your contacts on social networks.
What is your subscriber base at present?
Can’t give you the actual figures but I can tell you that our doubling rate is once every 5-6 weeks. We have received a phenomenal response to our offer.
With EQO, if I am calling someone overseas who is on regular phone, I use my local minutes. How do you make sure you are able to offer low cost calls? Do you pick the call from the GSM switch and put it on the Internet cloud?
Yes, we pick the call through a local POP and deliver it across our VoIP platform.
For such calls you are using the data connection for just the call set up. Right?
And does that mean that there are two call set ups - one via GSM and one via IP?
It is transparent to the user but yes there are physically two sets of calls that we are routing to the end-user.
Why do you have to make use of callback then if you are using VoIP for transport?
Callback capability is for countries that are highly regulated in the area of IP. But it hasn’t dissuaded our users from using the service. It is a very streamlined user interface.
