Societe des Telecommunications Internationales du Tchad (SotelTchad) is a Chad

Chad

Chad , officially known as the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west...

ian telecommunications parastatal providing landline domestic and international telephone

Telephone

The telephone , colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to each other...

 service, as well as Internet service

Internet service provider

An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...

. SotelTchad was created in 2000, when domestic phone services were detached from the postal service

Mail

Mail, or post, is a system for transporting letters and other tangible objects: written documents, typically enclosed in envelopes, and also small packages are delivered to destinations around the world. Anything sent through the postal system is called mail or post.In principle, a postal service...

. The government initially stated its intention to privatize the parastatal through international bidding, but this was put on hold. Company advertisements in late 2000 stated that there were 10,260 telephones and 1,020 Internet subscribers in the country. In 2001, SotelTchad agreed to a partnership with ITXC

ITXC

ITXC Corporation was a US based wholesale provider of Voice over IP , Internet-based phone calls.It was co-founded by Tom Evslin and his wife Mary in 1997 with seed money from AT&T and VocalTec . In 2000, it had the largest Internet telephony network in the world. The company was acquired by...

 to provide international phone service via Internet telephony

Voice over IP

Voice over Internet Protocol is a family of technologies, methodologies, communication protocols, and transmission techniques for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol networks, such as the Internet...

  However, by 2005 cellphone users on private networks vastly outnumbered the users of landlines.