VP Faure visits Venture Bay, Kokonet |19 May 2015
To commemorate world telecommunication and information society day, Vice-President Danny Faure visited the Kokonet Network Operations Centre at ex-Siba and Venture Bay at Eden Island yesterday.
Information, communication and technology principal secretary Benjamin Choppy accompanied VP Faure on his visits.
Robert Stravens and Sharon Dine are the co-founders of Venture Bay – an online shopping centre –which started off with a website and a very small shop of only 25m2 in Victoria. It is now occupying a 100m2 shop at Eden Plaza and soon will be moving into a bigger 250 m2 shop.
Venture Bay specialises in UK high street brands fashion wear for men, women, kids and babies as well as games and toys such as PS4.
Mr Stravens said they started the business in July 2012 following the connection of the submarine cable.
“Our website and the digital platform have been the reasons for the growth. That was the catalyst for us to start our business and we wanted to start something online and push e-commerce in Seychelles,” said Mr Stravens.
He also pointed out that the internet is a golden market place.
VP Faure also re-launched Venture Bay’s website and wished the co-owners best of luck.
PS Choppy said Venture Bay is a good example of a Seychelles company which has ventured in e-commerce and it is able to exploit the facilities offered by the submarine cable through the bandwidth capacity. It is one of the fully transactional e-commerce websites.
“The department hopes others would be so innovative to use this type of technology in the same context,” said PS Choppy.
At the Kokonet Network Operations Centre at ex-Siba, VP Faure was welcomed by Kokonet managing director Bernard Moutia and he was taken on a tour of the company and got acquainted with the new developments.
Kokonet showcased the latest from its R&D bench, an experimental GSM set-up based on OpenBTS. This comes after Kokonet was issued with an experimental license for mobile GSM network and successfully integrated OpentBTS with its existing Kokotalk VoIP system, with tests currently being conducted.
Vice-President Faure was very happy to see the new developments and noted that “all the products are very revolutionary” adding that he is “very happy that this product will enable people from outer islands to communicate easily.”
The VP assured Mr Moutia of his support and has promised to help ease the process once the testing period is over.
Kokonet as a dual-play telecom provider provides internet as well as telephony services. In recent times the company has put a lot of resources into the research and development of Kokotalk, a service that allows users to make really easy calls from and to Seychelles, at a fraction of the cost charged by other operators.
Kokotalk is constantly evolving. Gone are the days when it used to be a call-back service only, with customers now also having the choice of using an app on their android or IOS smartphones, or using a fixed VOIP phone to make calls. One of the many benefits of the service is the OneNumber concept. This means you can have one number for all your devices, and dialing that number will ring all your phones at the same time, and you can decide which one you want to answer. Even if you change telecom provider or get a new phone, your OneNumber will still stay the same. In essence, this is number portability, a real ‘first’ in Seychelles.
OpenBTS is an open Base Transceiver Station where a BTS is a transparent open source gateway between the cell phones and the VoIP network. This technology promises to deliver mobile networks to the remotest areas at a significantly lower cost than the traditional BTS. With this in mind, Kokonet is proposing mobile communication at a much reduced cost.
Let us wait and see how this new product works.
Today VP Faure will visit the Pure Fm radio station and Intelvision.