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.
