'No strings attached'
Battaglia new to telecom market
July 24, 2010
Steve Buist
The Hamilton Spectator
http://www.thespec.com/News/Business/article/813193
Property developer, airport operator, even part-owner of the Hamilton Bulldogs hockey team at one time.
Now, Tony Battaglia hopes to conquer the rapidly evolving world of telecommunications.
Battaglia is the president and CEO of a small, Hamilton-based phone company called talkit.ca, which is offering a full year of home telephone service for $59.99, including unlimited long-distance calling across Canada.
"I knew nothing about the airport industry and I learned pretty quick," said Battaglia, the founder and former chair of TradePort, the company that operates Hamilton's airport.
"Now we're teaching him the phone business," chuckled Victor Rossetani, founder of talkit.ca and the company's vice-president of sales and marketing.
"Business is business," Battaglia added simply. "I bring my strengths to the table.
"I'm more of a business manager and my partners certainly know the phone industry very, very well and the technology side of it. It's a good team and we expect great things in the future."
Talkit.ca is one of a growing number of Canadian companies offering telephone service through the Internet, using so-called VoIP technology -- Voice over Internet Protocol.
The company, with downtown headquarters on Main Street West, currently has nine employees and about 2,000 subscribers.
Without the need to establish expensive infrastructure, VoIP phone service providers typically offer subscribers a cheaper alternative with a larger range of add-on features than the traditional phone companies such as Bell.
Subscribers to talkit.ca purchase an adapter that connects to an Internet modem, with a spot for a regular phone to be plugged in.
In addition to unlimited Canada-wide calling for an annual fee of $59.99, subscribers receive free features such as call waiting, call forwarding, three-way calling, caller ID and a feature that allows voice-mail messages to be transferred as e-mail.
The adapter actually has two telephone jack spots, so subscribers who run a home business, for example, can purchase a second line for another $59.99 per year.
Battaglia said some subscribers have bought a second adapter and sent it to relatives in another country.
"Now they can both have a Canadian phone number and call each other all they want for free," he said.
All of this sounds too good to be true, he's told.
"We get that an awful lot, but it is absolutely true," said Battaglia. "In fact, you'll see our catchphrase below the logo is 'No strings attached.'
"There are no strings attached," he said. "It is what it is.
"We're offering it at a very low rate because we want to grow market share. We can do it at that price because we don't have a huge infrastructure like a lot of the other telephone providers do."
There are skeptics, however, including Jon Arnold, a Toronto-based telecom and VoIP expert who wondered aloud how talkit.ca can offer unlimited Canada-wide calling with so many features for such a low price.
"The problem is when you come in so cheap, there's nowhere to go but up," said Arnold. "There's no upside to coming into the market so cheap, and there's no need to because nobody prices it that cheap."
Arnold called it a "desperate strategy."
"Customer acquisition costs are what keep companies like this out of the marketplace," said Arnold. "It's just too hard to score people off other carriers.
"This isn't about generating new subscribers for phone users, it's about stealing them from somebody else."