While not a surprise to many in the Mobile VoIP space, Tesco has launched their Freshtel Mobile VoIP service in Australia.
Now here’s my speculation.
Australia is a wonderful market to trial things in. The country has very solid IP networks from Telstra. It is an English language country. Mobile is well thought of there and in many ways its a greenfield market.
Tesco also has stores in the UK and is expanding into the USA with Freshies. I would expect that over the next few years if Freshtel is a success down under, that Tesco (a company that WalMart views as a rival globally) will be selling this in the UK and USA as well.
Andy,
Just a couple of quick points that I dont think came across clearly in your blog post.
Freshtel is an Australian company – not a brand developed by Tesco.
Freshtel is listed on the ASX and was run by CEO Michael Carew who has recently resigned to take up the Chairman role.
Freshtel developed the Firefly softphone used for their ‘vonage style telco in Australia which they licensed to Tesco in the UK for their voip service.
Freshtel developed the mobile voip application which Tesco has already launched in the UK….Australia will not be the first location to use it – this application is already up and running in the UK.
Yes Australia is a great location to ‘test’ products with great bandwidth penetration and a fast adoption market….albeit with much lower total bandwidth download caps that the USA.
A lot of my USA based clients are continually surprised with how easy it is to market technology to the Australian market as very similar markets.
….and it’s a great place to visit to boot.
Cheers,
Dean Collins
http://www.Cognation.net