Airtel Ghana in partnership with DOTGO has introduced a new SMS Web Browsing service to its over 4 million customers.
The service will give all mobile phone users access to the internet without cellular data or Wi-Fi and will target mobile users in areas with low internet penetration.
Browsing services on the DOTGO platform include access to email, news, and websites like Wikipedia, Yahoo and Facebook.
The DOTGO’s SMS Web Browsing service is easy: A subscriber just sends an SMS to DOTGO containing the name of the website they want to browse. DOTGO responds with an interactive menu-based version of the website condensed and formatted for SMS.
Manu Rajan, Marketing Director for Airtel Ghana commented: “DOTGO’s powerful platform has democratized the Internet for our subscribers. Yes, smartphone adoption is growing fast, but feature phones are still heavily in use. With DOTGO’s expertise, we have instantly increased Internet penetration in Ghana by enabling our feature-phone users to access the Internet with their existing phones.”
“Nearly two thirds of the world lack access to the Internet, and we are proud to have developed a messaging technology that can go some way towards changing this,” said DOTGO co-founder and CEO Stefan Gromoll.
“The benefit for mobile operators using DOTGO’s SMS Browsing service is that they can deliver basic Internet access to every single subscriber, from urban centers to the farthest corners of a country. They can then go on to use the same core platform from DOTGO to deliver a range of additional revenue-generating SMS- and data-based messaging services for feature phone and smartphone users alike.”
Significantly, DOTGO’s messaging platform also provides mobile operators with much-needed protection against the growing revenue losses caused by Internet-based services that bypass the carrier.