This announcement will surprise many. According to information from the new online media the informedMicrosoft became a telecom operator following an authorization granted by the Electronic Communications Regulatory Authority (Arcep) last September.
A new Microsoft offering dedicated to businesses
Specifically, it concerns Team’s collaborative communication application, whose users will now be able to take advantage of phone numbers. According to our colleagues, they will therefore be able to make or receive calls from any landline or mobile line.
This news is anything but trivial because it is clearly possible to see companies that choose a centralization of their exchanges on the solution implemented by Microsoft. What to do very badly for the competitors and especially the French Orange, SFR and Bouygues Telecom, which also implement offers dedicated to professionals.
At least Microsoft was able to convince the French administrative authority. Like our colleagues from BFM, it is indeed necessary to fulfill certain specific conditions to benefit from the status of telecommunications operator in France. It is therefore necessary to take responsibility for emergency numbers, data storage, but also the sharing of information or interception of communications with the judicial authorities in connection with investigations.
From now on, the Redmond company intends to shift gears as it will deploy globally in the telecommunications sector via its Teams Phone offering, which is currently in the testing phase in the US. Its customers will therefore benefit from a telephone number and take a further step in terms of communication.
A six-year-old case
It is worth remembering that the question of whether Microsoft is a telecom operator already goes back several years. On lemon squeezerwe talked to you in particular about this file in 2016. It was then a matter of Skype messages, which allows its users to make national and international calls or send SMS.
We also expect Microsoft to take the lead by focusing on their Enterprise offering. Moreover, the Tech giant had confirmed that it had submitted a request to Arcep this year regarding its service dedicated to Skype for Business professionals. There was already at that time no question of extending it to the general public.
Finally, we provided information that was astonishing to say the least: as of November 2016, France had more than 2,000 telecom operators. And for good reason, it is not necessary to have a mobile network to achieve this status, but it is sufficient to take advantage of it.