AQL Offers Free SMS to Corporate VoIP Customers

AQ Ltd, a UK provider of domain name registration, hosting, corporate SMS and voice telephony services, is offering free SMS messaging between IP phones, on its own network and to subscribers of other VoIP providers with which it peers.

Adam Beaumont, managing director of the Leeds-based company, said it has been in the SMS market since 2001, primarily offering corporate customers the ability, for instance, to send text messages to field engineers for better workflow.

“We’re not in SMS marketing,” he emphasized, arguing that the nearest his company comes to B2C communications is enabling insurance companies to inform their customers that their car insurance is about to run out.

The field force automation for which its customers use SMS is a major generator of traffic over AQL’s data network, which links to cellular operators’ networks for termination, at which point they are charged a termination fee.

Clearly, this starts to become a significant cost if thousands of messages are being sent to a large field force every day, so one of the drivers for the free SMS offering from AQL is to show its customers it is working to reduce their expenditure.

It has begun offering them a UTStarcom F3000 handset from the Sino-American manufacturer of the same name, on which they can receive messages whenever they are registered to their VoIP account, i.e. whenever they are within reach of a WiFi hotspot.

When outside of one, they can still have messages sent to regular mobile phones, for which AQL charges them anywhere from 5p to 12p (9 cents to 22 cents) per message, depending on the tariff package selected.

The service, which comes with a UK phone number (AQL is a registered telco and so has numbers issued to it by the regulator Ofcom), costs 2.00 pounds ($3.73) a month with unlimited free SMS and VoIP calls on its network, plus the per-message charge for messages to cellphones and per-minute charges for voice calls to PSTN phones (1p per minute to US numbers, for instance). The handset costs 149 pounds ($278) plus tax.

This is, of course, only a first phase for the service, the ideal scenario being a dual-mode WiFi/cellular phone, which would mean messages could be sent over the WLAN link for free whenever possible and over the charged WWAN when not, but always to the same device. Beaumont cited early examples of such phones from companies like Nokia as potential devices AQL could use down the road for this purpose.

A second motive for the offering, Beaumont went on, is to attract other VoIP providers running, like AQL, on the SIP protocol to enter into peering arrangements with his company.

These would enable their customers to send and receive free SMS to AQL subscribers and, since the deal would extend to voice traffic (which AQL runs over a dedicated separate network), to make voice calls between the networks free of charge too. This would represent a significant step forward, because without SIP peering, calls from one VoIP provider’s network to subscribers on another have to traverse a traditional PSTN network, which implies cost.