July/Aug 2004

You might think it would be cheaper to call a mobile phone from a landline than from another mobile phone, but in fact the opposite can often be the case. Which is why a company called CellClear reckons it can reduce the cost of such calls for telecommunications managers by up to 60 per cent.

The company points out that the number of calls from fixed phones to mobiles has rocketed as more and more people have started using mobiles routinely - and that costs have soared as a result.

Its solution is a hardware device - technically an enterprise GSM gateway - which is attached directly to the user organisation's PBX in-house phone exchange. The PBX sends calls intended for mobiles to the gateway, which delivers the call via a SIM Card direct to the mobile network. In effect, the gateway effectively "converts" a landline-to-mobile call into a mobile-to-mobile phone call, so that it never hits the fixed-phone network.