A telco company without the telco network
Uber is the world’s largest taxi company but does not own a vehicle. Hilton took nearly 100 years to amass 600,000 rooms. Airbnb has nearly 1,000,000 rooms and does not own a single room. This is the new world order for business where owning is not necessary to be a viable and disrupting business. In fact owning large assets is a hindrance to remaining nimble and being able to pivot at will.
Telephone companies around the world have billions of dollars tied up in infrastructure and legacy software systems. They also employ thousands to run their businesses. They are predominantly within one continent with a small percentage of revenue coming from other continents.
Splora is set to disrupt this model in the same way that Uber and Airbnb are doing in their business categories.
Splora is an app that turns an Android device into a full blown PBX extension delivering high quality telephony and video along with a dashboard to control the things in your life like home automation and security. All that is required is a download of the free app and an Internet connection. No other infrastructure is required. When compared to other services like Skype the feature set is compelling. It is not just a phone but a means for running your life from anywhere.
The Splora service is delivered via the Amazon Cloud and has no owned infrastructure. It is available anywhere in the world and able to automatically scale to meet demand. A load test was run over the last 15 hours by starting 50 new calls every second. At the end of 15 hours there were 2.5 million calls in progress with less than 10% of capacity being used on a virtual server.
The app is free and calls between Splora are free. Subscriptions will be available to call traditional phone numbers. Splora is the first service to allow calls to be made to it from other devices without the need for a public telephone number. This is the start of a new model where no telephone numbers will be needed.
A beta launch of the service will begin in three weeks with a segment on a National Television Channel calling for large numbers of beta testers to stress test the system. A special offer of $4.95 per month for unlimited National calls will be available to participants.
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