Thomson’s Cirpack Mobile IP Centrex solutions selected by major European mobile operator for advanced business telephony services
Thomson has announced that SFR, the leading French mobile operator, has selected Thomson’s Cirpack switches with Mobile IP Centrex capabilities to offer advanced business telephony features with fixed mobile convergence to enterprise users. SFR is one of Europe’s largest mobile operators with a customer base of 17.8 million subscribers.
Bertrand Mabille, Director General of SFR’s Entreprise Business Unit explained “Our strategy is what the Anglo-Saxons would call ‘mobile centric’ – it consists of giving a central role to the mobile phone in convergent solutions, adding all the services that can be enjoyed with fixed line technology. Our service orientated philosophy means that we need the best technology at the best price. Thomson’s Cirpack voice switching solutions answered our criteria and we believe that they are the most technologically advanced systems currently available in the field of convergence. Cirpack’s reputation for reliability was key for supporting our strategy as providing seamless services for both mobile phones and fixed lines.”
Jacques DunoguŽ, SEVP of Thomson’s Systems division noted: “Fixed Mobile Convergence has been very much talked about. Thomson is now deploying with Vodafone one of the world’s largest FMC services, enabling unique features to be offered to business users. This achievement adds to other recent deployments and confirms Thomson’s Cirpack leadership in both technical capacities and market reach.
This contract demonstrates Thomson’s commitment to helping service providers build innovative services and increase their competitive edge. This is in fact the first solution of this type to be launched in France.”
SFR has selected Thomson’s Cirpack softswitches with Mobile IP Centrex to provide a full set of voice services over converged Mobile/IP networks. Users will benefit from a single phone number for both mobile and fixed lines, with simultaneous ringing and unified voice messaging on both phones. With SFR’s new offer, business customers will be able to use their mobile handset to profit from all of the advanced features that are available on enterprise IP Centrex systems such as call transfer, call conferencing, short-dialling, filtering and supervision by an assistant. Because these features are managed by the Cirpack application in SFR Vodafone’s infrastructure, they are available on any legacy GSM phone. Users will therefore not be obliged to change mobile phones to benefit from these new FMC services.