Providing cheap phone calls and marketing merchants are among selling points for South African built mobile application ‘ttrumpet’, which launched last week.

The app, which is available on Android and Apple stores, offers free calls between two users of the service.

Meanwhile, ttrumpet further offers call rates to SA mobile devices at R0.65 and R0.40 to landlines.

This mobile tariff in particular is marginally cheaper than that of South African mobile network Cell C, which has cut its call rates from R0.99 per minute to R0.66 amid a local price war.

Makers of ttrumpet; though, say it also provides up to 70% cheaper international call rates.

Grant Theis (pictured), co-founder of ttrumpet, explains to ITWeb Africa how the app offers cheaper calls.

“At a communication layer, ttrumpet goes further up the value chain in South Africa than any other over-the-top (OTT) service,” Theis says.

“ttrumpet has direct interconnect arrangements and not only sells VOIP calls, but GSM airtime through the app as well - to be used when the user is out of data coverage.

“ttrumpet is also currently in the process of providing mobile data services, Wi-Fi and international data roaming services using ttrumpet credits as a universal communications wallet. This is possible because ttrumpet and its sister company Connection Telecom already terminates a lot of VOIP traffic in SA and has an Electronic Communication Network Service licence,” Theis tells Africa.

Theis goes on further to say that ttrumpet is a 100% owned subsidiary of South African technology company Fastcomm, and that the app was mainly built in South Africa but also used various developers and technologies from other countries.

“ttrumpet’s technical and development team is based in the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) complex and its head office is in Cape Town. ttrumpet also runs small offices in London and Atlanta, USA,” Theis says.

Apart from providing cheaper voice calls, the service also intends connecting merchants, brands and retailers to customers.

“The platform allows these entities to market themselves into the app through vouchers, m-commerce, location-based search, image recognition, Augmented Reality and iBeacons etc.”

“ttrumpet is not simply an app,” says Theis.