PHP Trainer - Karan Singh Cypher

Karan Singh, Current Position-Director of Cypher 7 Limited From 10 Years

Karan has always had an interest in corporate finance and management and since school he has always taken a keen interest in analysis and strategy.

Karan then partnered up with a friend from college who was from Thailand and they started their first company AG Soft. AG Soft was initially begun as an application development software company. The idea was that there would be a specialised team based out of Bangkok where AGS could outsource work from European companies with regards to application development. The team that was developed started their works within application development doing works for large job recruitment sites, small telecoms companies and other e commerce websites.

Whilst developing software the team in Bangkok had come across a new technology that had become advanced enough to become commercially viable. This technology was called Voice Over IP. This technology takes voice and using telephony switching equipment it converts this voice into data. This data is then carried over the internet (free carry as opposed to traditional switching methods of using fibre optics etc) and then converted back into voice at the point of its termination destination (which was internally called the prison point). This technology is used for carrying international voice traffic. It is as if the caller is benefiting from services such as skype and only paying the local carrying charges as calls are being made from fixed lines or mobiles.

In 2006 funding was provided for the capitalisation of Cypher 7 Tel 7. Cypher 7 Tel 7 employed the same strategy as AG Soft with two major differences. The first was that the traffic being sold was going to be sold to major carriers such as british telecom, band x, Singtel, At&t etc and the other was that it if it was going to be able to host such large carriers it would need to offer more international destinations than just be restricted in offering one international destination as part of its offering. Following this a number of POPs (points of presence) were set up and many interconnecting agreements were developed with major telecom carriers.

Cypher 7 was in the business of providing cheaper international phone calls using a technology called Voice Over the Internet Protocol (VoIP). Traditionally calls were passed through fibre optic cables and the infrastructure required to transmit international calls were vast. For this reason call costs were very high and could only be facilitated by major telcos. VoIP was a recent technology that basically used the internet to transmit these calls. The technology would convert voice packets into data packets, transmit these data packets over the internet and then convert these data packets back into voice packets when it reached the point of transmission. This means that there was a huge cost saving in transmitting these calls as the requirement for vast fibre optic cables running under the sea etc were now not required.

Cypher 7 owned a Cisco telecoms switch, which was housed at Telehouse Coriander Avenue UK. This major telecoms switch was purchased by Cypher 7. 

The purpose of this switch was to be able to connect to major telcos so they have the capability to route and transfer calls to Cypher 7 switch using the same protocol. Each one of Cypher 7’s customer was either a tier one telco or other wholesale call providers. They were customers of Cypher 7 as Cypher 7 would route their international calls to selected destinations using VoIP at a cheaper rate than what these customers were obtaining from their other providers. When Cypher 7 secured a customer they would sign ‘interconnect’ agreements with these customers. This would mean that the customer would set up a dedicated line to route calls from their network to the Cypher 7 network in order for Cypher 7 to complete the international call at a lower rate than what they would get from their other providers. These interconnect agreements were not easy to come by. The customer was required to do much due diligence of the technology being used by Cypher 7 and they had to ensure that any call traffic that was routed to Cypher 7 would infact be terminated (call would go through) and more importantly the call would be routed as a very good quality call. These major telcos had to ensure that the quality of call their customers were using was of very high quality because it directly reflects on the customer. Cypher 7 had interconnect agreements with many telcos such as British Telecom,Singtel, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom to name but a few. These sorts of customers had to ensure that the quality their customers get when making an international phone call is of very good quality. If someone in London is dialling their relative in Egypt and using a BT phone line they would expect the quality of the call to be very good. They would not accept calls dropping, or major delays whilst speaking (the voice can only be heard by the other end after many seconds of delay) or an unclear line. This is why it was not easy to get these interconnect agreements as these customers before accepting to route calls using the Cypher 7 network would have to be sure that not only is our network capable of transmitting such calls but also that these calls would be of very good quality and also very consistent. Without these sort of customers, Cypher 7 would be prison ed in only providing to voice exchanges where the market place would change and fluctuate daily.