VoIP company Truphone has announced it has bought up the strategic assets of SIM4travel, which sells low cost roaming minutes and texts to European travellers, comprising its mobile virtual network enabler and its travel SIM capabilities. The acquisition cost Truphone £1.343 million in cash and £1.3 million in shares.
Truphone says it will start integrating SIM4travel’s GSM goodies with its own VoIP ones right away and reckons it will be several months before it’s done.
Truphone is better known for its wi-fi calling/texting service, so this acquisition will see them combining that with cheap GSM services. It’s going to be seriously interesting to see what the combined Truphone-SIM4Travel will look like – could we be witnessing the birth of Truphone as a fully-fledge MVNO?
I’ve just been reading a bit more about this and I came across the Truphone blog with their announcement published on it.
While reading [the very short] announcement I saw the ‘Truphone in the News’ section. I hope they’ve just forgotten to update this because the latest article is back in July ’07.
I know Truphone probably wanted to keep this deal quiet and has been in a ‘spat’ with T-Mobile, but I would have thought that there was plenty of positive news or just industry knowledge that could have made its way into the media between now and July …