BELLEVUE, Wash.-Nippon Telephone and Telegraph and AccessLine Technologies organized a venture to bring one-number services to Japan’s personal communications services market.
One Number Service Inc. is being launched by the two companies as well as AT&T Corp., France Telecom, several NTT subsidiaries, Korea Telecom, Korea Mobile Telecom, Mitsubishi Corp. and other Asian telecom companies, banks and investors.
AccessLine of Bellevue, Wash., offers automatic call routing between users’ mobile, office and home phones and other wireless devices. Concurrently, the company introduced the 6.0 version of its One Person, One Number service. The system is faster, users can decide where to send calls that come in while they are on the line and a sequential ringing feature prioritizes the order of locations a call travels to find the user.
One-number service is expected to begin in Tokyo in May, said AccessLine. Five years out the company expects to garner between 200,000 and 300,000 subscribers in the Tokyo metropolitan area.
Daniel Kranzler, AccessLine’s chairman and chief executive officer said the combined resources and expertise gained through the alliance “allows lower cost introduction of service and competitive advantage for the partners who can continue to maintain focus on their core businesses.”