Demand soars for BNS WiDial
Oct 4 2007 by Graeme King, The Journal
TELECOMS company BNS says it has seen massive demand for its new wireless telephone service which uses internet connections to deliver cheap phone calls.
The Northumberland company only launched the WiDial service in April, but managing director Garry Moat said yesterday that the three months from July to September had been the busiest in the company’s history – and he had taken on more people to cope with demand.
The WiDial service works by offering cheaper than usual telephone calls to mobile phone users by allowing them to connect calls using the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) system currently used mainly from PC to PC.
Providers such as Skype have been offering the chance to make free phone calls over the internet for some time. But BNS is offering some of the same benefits while using mobile handsets. WiDial sees mobiles work normally most of the time, but when a user is in a WiFi “hotspot” – where you can get online with your computer without plugging into a phone line – they can make cheaper phone calls than usual.
BNS has placed significant faith in WiDial proving a success after a period when it had to make a recovery from a big drop in revenues. The company posted full year profits 47% down at £654,000 on sales of £25.8m for the year to July 31, 2006.
But now Mr Moat and his team are seeing good progress from the introduction of WiDial – and the company has already said its results for the year to July 31 will be in line with City expectations. That would see the company post pre-tax profits of £682,000 on turnover of some £36.8m.
The success of WiDial has been partly driven by the expansion of WiFi availability with ever more hotels, transport providers and cafe and bars installing a network.
And now BT and fellow WiFi provider The Cloud have invested in making Newcastle city centre into one big WiFi enabled area.
Mr Moat said: “The WiDial service has been a roaring success. We are the strongest we’ve been at any time in the company’s history. We have had the best three months we have ever had through July, August and September.
“This has way exceeded all our expectations. I think it’s about cost, convenience, and the fact that people like to have the latest technology. The speed of response in these early stages has really caught us on the hop. We’ve had to take on extra engineers and extra customer service staff.
“It’s bizarre because the business sells about 50 telephone systems per month, but already the IP telephony (WiFi technology) side is out-selling that. And we are very pleased that our partners BT OpenZone and The Cloud have decided to make Newcastle city centre one of the first WiFi zoned cities.”
Prudhoe-based BNS, which employs 230 people, has spent £1.2m buying four VoIP specialist companies, since it floated in November 2005. It has a VoIP network which can handle 500 million minutes of traffic per month.
