Established in 2001, the UK-based Imass Telecom is a wholesale carrier of international phone calls, providing termination services for carriers. The company is a telephony wholesaler selling only to carriers and other resellers, and is a supplier to both incumbent and newly competitive fixed-line and mobile carriers. More recently, Imass Telecom has launched revenue-generating open standards-based MMS service platform. This helps telecom operators and larger service providers to transition their messaging systems to next-generation technology and to quickly and cost-effectively launch new services and modify the existing ones. Tej Sood, co-founder and CEO, Imass Telecom, talks about his plans for India.

What is your Indian strategy?
Through our worldwide termination service, we intend to gain stable routes for termination in India at the most competitive prices. In addition, we are also seeking to terminate traffic for Indian carriers through our network of the largest European carriers for delivery worldwide. Imass Telecom is also a developer of the latest generation and the next-generation messaging platforms. We are ready to serve the leading Indian cellular operators’ middleware solution on MMS platform. This platform is backed by our development partners like IBM. Through our partners, we have access to relationships with the leading wireless carriers in Europe. The experience that we can bring to the Indian cellular operations through these relationships can help avoid the expensive mistakes that many cellular operators around the world have made in their growth model.

As of now, do you have any clients in India?
We are in discussions with the leading Indian cellular operators, such as Bharti Tele-ventures, BPL Mobile, and Reliance Infocomm. We are also in discussions with the other Indian telecom operators.

Who are the carriers you have tied up with as of now?
We send traffic through ten of the largest European carriers.

Do you see MMS taking off in India at all, given the poor response to the services till now?
I am confident that MMS will soon take off in an explosive way in India. The MMS service is likely to be just as, if not more, popular as SMS currently is, and will be used primarily by the youth market. At the moment, the response has been fairly poor because of the high prices of handsets. As soon as the handset prices fall to around Rs 10,000, say in the next six months or so, there will be a rapid rise in the number of users.

Sudesh Prasad