Reference: Microsoft Roadmap
About Calling Plans
We haven’t had any news on Microsoft provided calling plans (Microsoft providing user phone numbers and minutes) for over a year when Canada was added. It really feels like Microsoft have taken their foot off the gas with adding any more countries and that Direct Routing provided by carriers offers and easier and more global model. Microsoft cover 10 countries for first party calling plans:
- Belgium
- Canada
- France
- Germany
- Ireland
- Puerto Rico
- Netherlands
- Spain
- United Kingdom (U.K.)
- United States (U.S.)
There is also Australia, that is actually provided directly by Telstra. this is a little bit different though. It’s only available in Australia with your Office 365 tenant being in Australia and with Telstra as your CSP (Microsoft Cloud Service Provider). So a regular Office 365 tenant can’t get Australia numbers via this program.
Reference: Telstra
SoftBank is working with Microsoft to deliver their UniTalk calling plans to Office 365 customers in Japan
Now, according to the roadmap, it looks like SoftBank, a Japanese company and the sixth-largest telephone operating company by total revenue of $74.7 B USD (Reference), is looking to follow a similar model to Telstra.
Again you tenant will have to be in Japan and I’m sure SoftBank will have to be your CSP. Their website also notes:
- Calls to emergency call numbers such as 110 and 119 can not be used, so please prepare another line where emergency calls can be made.
- This service can not be used to make international calls.
If you can read Japanese, or trust google translate, more details here: https://www.softbank.jp/biz/cloud/microsoft/o365/unitalk/
