We don’t sell infrastructure; we facilitate successful telecoms services – and the only gauge of success is profitability. We don’t create technological dependency and then use it for extortion; on the contrary, our open standards and our ability to adapt to proprietary interfaces give carriers a real alternative, irrespective of their infrastructure supplier.

We don’t reinvent the wheel with each project, wasting time and money, and we are not a software company that provides one-off solutions developed to order. With smart technology and comprehensive service applications, we lay the foundation for specific value-added services we believe in and for which we can present providers with compelling business cases. Our technology allows us to customize these services expediently and cost-effectively, both to the particularities of each carrier’s network as well as to the requirements of his target customers.

The ideal customer for ECT shares our core values – specifically, providing value for money. If this is your goal, you’re not going to invest heavily in technology for its own sake or purchase more infrastructure than you absolutely need. Instead, you’re limiting your CAPEX and OPEX wherever possible. When you offer a new telecoms service, you’re not experimenting with large amounts of money: you know what you’re doing.

Why are you then interested in value-added telecoms services? The margins for plain old telephone calls are sinking rapidly. This is great for businesses and consumers, but it’s also good for you. The more competitive the market, the happier you are: in a competitive market “value for money” always wins over big names and big promises. Although killer apps are as rare as unicorns, you know that if you can add real value to the phone call, there’s good money to be earned.

“A fool and his money are soon parted.” We see again and again that this old saying still rings true. Even after the dot-com crash, there are carriers out there, big and small, that seem to have huge sums of money they don’t know what to do with. They often want to be talked into investing in fancy infrastructure and hyped technology with no idea how they will ever get a return on their investment. Doing this kind of business may sometimes be lucrative for our competitors, but it is not the business we’re looking for. If our customer were to lose money with a service we enable, this would go against everything we stand for.

For all these reasons we’re particularly proud that carriers such as Tele2 – who hate infrastructure and provide telecoms services people really want at the best price possible – choose ECT again and again as their partner. And the biggest USP we have is that our customers – former incumbents such as BT, Belgacom and TeliaSonera, alternative carriers such as Tele2 and Telewest, and major mobile carriers such as Vodafone D2 and Turkcell – all love us because we do a good job, which is revealed not only in our bottom line, but theirs as well.