The true benefit of Konektadong Pinoy Act

Finally, the true benefit of the Konektadong Pinoy Act is materializing with the entry of Velox Networks, a Singapore-based cloud telephony provider that can provide at a much lower cost voice, messaging and communications to Filipino companies using the Internet.

The Konektadong Pinoy measure removed the roadblocks to the entry of foreign telco providers by streamlining the licensing process, promoting infrastructure sharing and allowing new and smaller players to invest in data transmission infrastructure without requiring a legislative franchise — an outdated requirement unique to the Philippines.

Velox Networks has entered the Philippine market with an initial staff of 18 employees. It offers a telephony system that relies on the Internet, lowering the cost for both the company and its employees that rely on private telephone networks, such as a PBX or PABX system for internal and external communication.

A PBX/PABX phone system connects multiple extensions within an office to each other, consolidating multiple phone lines into one, as well as to a small number of outside lines. However, such systems require physical cable networks.

In an interview with Martin Nygate, founder and CEO of Velox Networks, he explained that the use PBX/PABX enables companies to do call recording, call monitoring, call reporting, transferring calls and allows calls between extensions free of charge.

In the Philippines, 90 to 95 percent of companies have some form of a PBX/PABX system in their office. The problem, he said, is that the manufacturers of these equipment no longer manufacture such devices and have also discontinued supporting them for many years “simply because people have moved on from analog technology to digital technology.” As such, he said, “PBXs, are no longer supported and have reached the end of their life. Yet 90 to 95 percent of companies in the Philippines still have these telephony PABXs in their office.”

Nygate noted that the PBX and PABX systems are now hardly ever used. He cited that the telephony infrastructure in the country “ is very bad indeed and very expensive. So often these systems fall out of usage because they simply don’t work properly, and the reason they don’t work properly is that the voice networks of Globe and PLDT over the years have lacked or have suffered from a lack of investment, and they’re just falling apart.” This is evident, he said from “all those black spaghetti wires” that we see along our streets. “That’s all part of the problem,” he stressed.

“What actually happens in the Philippines,” Nygate said, “is that people are always using their personal cellphones.... 90 to 95 percent of all companies will be using their personal cellphones for business calls, and the reason they do this is, number one, the telephone system in the office doesn’t work, and number two, often people work from home or in a hybrid situation...and they can’t be tied down to a physical phone on the desk. They need to be working from home, and that’s why a lot of people use their personal cell phone for business calls.”

The Velox founder noted that the issue with that is “First of all, if you are a company and your staff are using their personal cellphones to make business calls, at the end of the day, when one of your staff member resigns, he takes all that data with him because, of course, he can still receive phone calls on his personal phone from his customers from his previous company. So, there is a huge commercial and operational risk with companies or with individuals using their personal cellphones for business purposes.”

Some companies, he continued, recognize these problems and opt to provide their staff members with a second phone, a business phone, so that when they leave the company, they have to return the office phone.”The cost of this is very high and also results in an operational and financial risk, as well as a security risk as people use their personal cellphones for business purposes,” he argues.

“With cloud technology like Velox on your cell phone,” Nygate explained, “you can have an app that will allow you to make and receive business calls. So, in the same way that you’ve got WhatsApp on your cell phone, you can have an app, Velox Prime, which you can download from the App store, and once you install it and you put in the user ID and password, you can immediately start making and receiving calls from anywhere in the world.”

Geography, he said, would no longer be an issue. “You can work from home. You can work from anywhere in the world, and you can make and receive business calls using your cellphone...So, what this means is that with this technology, what you can do is you can now have a business line on your personal cellphone. If you leave the company within two seconds, I can, or you can ...the customer can disengage the app so you can’t take all the information with you, and they can give the app to someone else in the company.”

Velox, thus, Nygate said, “provides a cloud telephony platform that replaces conventional telephony system like PBXs, replacing such system with a cloud platform that allows users to make and receive calls with all the business features that you need, including call recording, call reporting, including transfer calls, everything you’ve got, at a far, far, far cheaper rate than what you’re using right now.”

The cost, he said, would depend on the number of users, “but it can be as low as $18 to $20 a month. You get all the functionality that you need, and there are no other costs involved. There are no set up fees. There are no installation charges.”