Voice-mail - Virtual Telephony

Other interesting markets developed from the carrier market including a concept called "virtual telephony." Virtual Telephony, developed by Octel, used voice-mail to provide phone service rapidly in emerging countries without wiring for telephones. The problem this solved was that emerging countries did not have many telephones. Wiring for telephones was very expensive, and many poorer citizens didn't have homes to wire. The economies of emerging countries were held back partly because people couldn't communicate beyond the area where they could walk or ride a bicycle. Giving them phones was one way to help their economies, but there wasn't a practical way to do it. In some countries, the wait for a phone was several years and the cost was in the thousands of dollars. Cellular phones weren't an option at the time because they were extremely expensive (thousands of dollars per handset) and the infrastructure to install cell sites was also costly.

With virtual telephony, each person could be given a phone number (just the number, not the phone) and a voice mailbox. The citizen would also be given a pager. If someone called the phone number, it never rang on an actual phone, but would be routed immediately to a central voice-mail system. The voice-mail system answered the call and the caller could leave a long, detailed message. As soon as the message was received, the voice-mail system would trigger the citizen's pager. When the page was received, the citizen would find a pay phone and call in to pick up the message. This concept was used successfully in South America and South Africa.