Rogers Communications, Canada’s dominant communications provider, has enhanced the capability of its popular Rogers One Number service with an upgrade via applications provider BroadSoft’s voice applications platform BroadWorks. Leveraging the platform consumers will now be able to to use their existing mobile number for rich communications—voice, video and text services—across all of their mobile devices and computers.

As pointed out in the announcement of these new capabilities, the key BroadSoft-enabled features of Rogers One Number include:

• Single mobile number across devices - Callers dial the user's mobile number and reach the user on their mobile phone, PC /Mac or any other phone.
• Flexible call routing - Users can set up rules, to simultaneously or sequentially ring their devices, forward calls or send directly to voicemail.
• Rich Communications - Voice and video calling are easily accessible from the customer's enabled devices.
• Ability to move calls among devices - Users can ensure communication continuity by moving ongoing calls seamlessly from, for example, a mobile phone to a PC.

“Rogers One Number represents what mobile rich communications is supposed to be about - unfettered mobility and flexibility for consumers to communicate from anywhere and with any device,” said Michael Tessler, chief executive officer, BroadSoft. “By seamlessly supporting video and voice calls under a single mobile number identity across all devices, BroadWorks helps power an offering that truly sets Rogers apart in the innovative Canadian mobile services market.”

With the proliferation of devices that are capable of real-time multimedia interactions of all types, consumers are constantly seeking was to have the freedom to communicate when and how they wish on their device of choice, and the control to effectively manage who, what, when, where, why and how they communicate with at any given moment in time. The BroadWorks enhancements to Rogers One Number service hit the sweet spot in terms of what users want, especially younger ones who are always/all ways on.  

While many of the features are newer and easier to use versions of older functionality, the ability to move calls among devices is likely to be very attractive to the targeted audience. It is estimated that in the U.S., for example, that the average college student has six network-capable devices. It is not hard to imagine a call that starts while a user is mobile on a smartphone as a video one being transferred in a dorm room to a tablet or PC for an improved user experience.   It will be interesting to see how the new features impact customer adoption of the service in the next few quarters.