Agents move throughout tent cities and refugee areas offering free phone calls to anywhere in the world.

Voilá returned its trademark phone agents, (dressed in their lime green shirts, smocks and caps), to the streets of Port-au-Prince yesterday offering two minutes of free phone calling anywhere in the world to those Haitians displaced by the earthquake.   

“Toupatou”, the Kreyol word meaning everywhere, is a program set up by Voilá some three years ago to support the need for public telephony in Haiti and to respond to the entrepreneurial drive of Haiti’s young population.

These Haitians, some 15,000 of them, receive a public pay phone along with a special tariff plan and earn a profit for every minute sold.  They then roam throughout the main urban areas selling minutes to Voilá subscribers and offering public telephone service.

Since Monday, 18 January, Voilá has been contacting “Toupatou” agents to put them back to work in the service of their country, and In these special circumstances, they are being incentivized to move as many free minutes as possible.    As of 20 January, the deployment has been limited to 25 agents, as Voilá manages the security concerns associated with crowds anxious to reach their love ones.  However, “Toupatou” is expected to increase its presence in the coming days as more agents return to work and the security situations stabilizes.

Trilogy International Marketing LLC (“TIM”) is the exclusive agent in the United States for Communication Cellulaire d’Haiti S.A. (“Comcel”), the provider of Voilà wireless services in Haiti.

Tags: Wireless Service

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