Telecom Operators in Belgium support Covid19 Track & Trace call center

Telecom operators are joining forces in supporting the Covid19 Track & Trace call center to fight the Covid19 pandemic in Belgium.

The main telecom operators active in Belgium will continue to support the public authorities in their fight against the Covid19 pandemic through an important technical and financial contribution. More specifically in the Covid19 Track & Trace call center to be put in place in the coming days.

The corona-taskforce has decided to set up a call center which could reach up to a 2.000 people workforce, who will proactively contact Belgian residents who have positively tested for Covid19 and any Belgian resident they have recently been in contact with.

The objective being to follow the spread of the virus as closely as possible and mitigate the risks by asking the potentially infected people to quarantine and/or get tested.

As the volume of outgoing calls and SMS from this center is expected to be particularly high, BASE, Orange Belgium, Proximus, Scarlet, Telenet and VOO unanimously decided not to charge any interconnection/termination fee for these calls and SMS, which will translate in a massive reduction of the operational costs of the call center operated by the government. The support of the telecom operators is valid as long as this call centre is needed to fight the Covid19 pandemic.

Conscious of their critical role in this period of confinement to keep people connected to their loved ones and allow a much broader usage of home working, Belgian telecom operators are massively involved in the fight against the new coronavirus outbreak.

Besides optimizing their network to answer drastic changes in demand from residential and business users, the telecom operators have already taken additional community initiatives in these corona times, like their support of the government-led taskforce Data against Corona, whose objective is to follow the spread of the virus and act accordingly based on aggregated and anonymized information.

Belgian Telecom operators consider this support to the authorities’ call center as a part of their corporate social responsibility and the solidarity they can show by bringing solutions in their expertise domains to the government. The operators hope this new tool will help maintain a successful containment of the Covid19 outbreak.