Telviva enables
UK-SA local calls

Telviva has launched a new service for UK-registered South African businesses to manage cross-border communication more affordably and in line with regulations. Telviva Software International (TSI), through Telviva One, addresses rising international call costs and regulatory challenges by enabling local number presentation and local call rates.

Many businesses operate across SA and the UK, but cross-border communication can become costly without services that comply with local in-country call rates. According to Telviva chief commercial officer Rob Lith, SA businesses in particular face added challenges when communicating in the UK, following recent regulatory changes that increased international call termination rates 27-fold overnight.

“As one can imagine, this made international communication prohibitively expensive for many businesses with teams sitting in multiple countries,” says Lith.

TSI builds on Telviva’s strength as a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact centre as a service (CCaaS) provider. TSI offers a scalable solution tailored for SA businesses with UK-registered operations. Hosted in Amazon AWS in Ireland, the platform aims to deliver low-latency access to UK networks while maintaining regulatory compliance and delivering enterprise-grade voice performance.

_{Rob Lith, chief commercial officer of Telviva.}

“For starters, there are different telecommunications regulations in each country. Beyond that, there are high costs of maintaining separate communication infrastructures, over and above the challenges of maintaining seamless team communication across borders. Then, businesses need to worry about managing local number presentations and call rates.”

Lith says telecommunications regulations in the UK are particularly strict – no doubt a foreshadowing of where SA’s environment is headed.

“Businesses need to be able to navigate these requirements, such as Telephony Service Preferences to be complied with, restrictions on abandoned calls, limitations on repeat calling and mandatory live operator presence for certain call types. Non-compliance fines in the UK can seriously bite.”

Lith says that Telviva One’s international communication platform addresses these problems by allowing users to switch, seamlessly and easily, between UK and SA communication personas and present local numbers in each country.

“Importantly, this enables calls at local rates. The business needs to be registered within the UK or a UK Crown Dependency, which enables full compliance with international telecommunications regulations. In addition to this, there are free internal calls within the UK and SA operations.”

He says the solution maintains minimal, imperceivable call latency with significant reductions in communication costs. A handy functionality is the simple transfer of calls between UK and SA offices, along with the ability to work with a single provider for the solution in both countries.

“Being in both markets and understanding shared business challenges, we knew we needed to develop a solution that would alleviate the communication obstacles for businesses with operations in SA and the UK or a UK dependency,” says Lith.

“By effectively designing a service that enables users to switch between local communication personas, the service allows companies to make use of local numbers and rates, effectively reducing the financial and compliance burden of international communication.”