About one month ago the Malaysian network provider NasionCom launched its Mobile VoIP service called Nasion. And the mobile VoIP revolution began. I blogged about it here. But my blog was still only 10 days old then so I doubt that that many people read it. But at the end of the post I said “It is my prediction here at MOpocket that mobile VoIP will be the future standard in the mobile industry (even here in the US).” And I still believe that.

The importance concerning the convergence of Voip, WiFi and the cell-phone was made apparent to me during various conversations I had with Oliver Starr during the Politics-to-Go seminar hosted by IPDI in D.C this past September.

While handsets with Wifi capabilities were, at the time, just beginning to be manufactured seriously, the seamless integration between a call on a cell-phone via a network to a Wifi VoIP connection was not yet a reality (Oliver posted an article back when he was on the Wireless-Weblog about a Nokia technology that successfully did this, but I cant find it any longer). Meanwhile, a company called Convergin announced two days ago that it has enabled the first cellular / Wifi handoff without service level charges or interruptions. [PDF]. Oliver stressed to me the importance that such a technology will have on mobile telephony.

The WifI VoIP phenomena will, as Oliver points out, free the cell phone manufactures (as well as a plethora of 3rd party vendors and consumers) “from the dominion of the carriers.” As Oliver, in his usual eloquent style, puts it:

As it stands today, a cell phone without a network is basically a paperweight with a built in clock. As a result the carriers have been able to make or break handset manufacturers, dictating model features (like bluetooth or no), what kind of subsidy they offered also had a profound impact upon the consumer’s choice as well.

Think of the mobile as analagous to an automobile, the carriers build the roads. For the most part, cars aren’t terribly useful in the absence of roads, but wifi is like putting wings on that car and with services like UMA technology the handset manufacturers can actually deliver some fairly spectacular functionality without [a] true dial-tone ever being delivered to the phone.

Later on, Oliver even imagines a world in which “handset manufacturers put UMA controllers in their own core networks and further imagines what would happen they embedded routing right into every handset they make. This would allow a company like Nokia to displace the carriers themselves directly by distributing UMA handsets and running UMA over their core network. They already do this internally to some degree. Oliver sees a huge opportunity here for the carriers to be undercut, describing WiFi enabled mobile phones as “the ultimate corporate Trojan horse…get the carriers to distribute millions of phones all which have a dormant feature that could drive traffic right off the carrier network and straight to that of the device manufacturer itself” or, as Oliver also points out, to Google’s municipal WiFi project.

I only bring this up because there has been a lot of talk, recently, about EQO Communications (pronounced “echo”) Mobile Internet Phone Service for Skype. While the service doesn’t exactly USE the skype network or take advantage of, ehem, the carriers data networks… it still is a strong indicator as to what direction VoIP is going. An even stronger indicator is the little less known news that SIPQuest, a Canadian company that specializes in VoIP and multimedia systems, has upgraded its status in the Symbian OS smartphone movement by signing on to the company’s Platinum Program which allow the two companies to share Fixed Mobile Convergence and IP Multimedia Susbsytem technologies. In SIPquest’s word’s

“As a member of the Symbian Platinum Program, SIPquest is delighted to work with Symbian to bring functionally rich VoIP solutions to Symbian OS phones and thereby satisfy the needs of users that depend on dual mode—WiFi and GSM or WiFi and CDMA—features.”

So now we have to throw the Operating System manufactures into the pot of potential vendors that could greatly benefit from the mobile VoIP revolution. Let me put it to you the way SIPquest sees it. 70 million Americans use cell phone at work. 70% of all cell calls are made from a WiFi spot. By 2008, 25% of cell phones will be ’smart.’ Get the drift? A seamless user experience for WiFi and cellular calls is on its way.

I think that individuals, as well as and especially business’, will jump at the chance, if given, to use a VoIP service on their mobile phones to either conserve minutes and or make communication 10X more cost effective. Think about what would happen, for example, to Cingular’s International Roaming and International Long Distance Plan’s if people knew that they could just use their mobile phone’s WiFi connection (or even Cingular’s very own data network) to call Aunt Beatrice in Germany for 5 cents a minute instead of 36 cents. While in Barcelona, Cingular will be charging me 99 cents a minute to make as well a s receive phone calls; so you better believe I will be using my VoIP services as much as possible, and would, if I could, use it on my mobile.

There is also the issue of people using their carrier’s own data plan to make VoIP calls. But at the rate of how much data plan’s cost (especially the unlimited packages that one would need if they where constantly using Ev-Do or HSDPA or GPRS to make make VoIP calls), this is not yet a cost effective option. And, for one thing, I never heard of a person being able to buy a mobile phone with only a data plan (only a data plan with a PC card, yes, but only a data plan for a phone… I don’t think thats possible). Plus the carriers do control the roads and can make such activity impossible to do on their networks, but that usually leads to bad publicity. Nevertheless, using a carrier network for VoIP is not a cost effective option right now. But does raise some interesting issues.

Do the carriers have a defense? The trojan horse can only work once. I mean, unless cell phone manufactures open their own retail stores people will still have to buy the phones from the carriers and the people would still have to sign up for at least a minimum amount of minutes. But if people don’t sign up for or use the extra services provided by the network, because a WiFi UMD option exists, then that still is a nasty bruise to the carriers. Th carriers need the traffic, thats how they make money.

The carriers could, of course, start offering their own VoIP packages (perhaps starting with international calls) that would be able to work both in a general WiFi atmosphere as well as on their own networks (but with special discounts plus added benefits and services if used directly on their own data networks).

Update:

Also on this note is the story that chipmaker Royal Philips Electronics confirmed that a U.S. cellular carrier will launch voice-over-Wi-Fi technology this year, based on Philips’ new Nexperia 6120 chipset. This will allows callers o make calls on their home Wi-Fi networks for “a couple of bucks a month, flat rate,” says Philips’ Carsten Schimanke. The chip set is already “trojan horsed” in the Samsung SGH-T709 phone. [thanks Emily] This is how it works:

Nexperia’s UMA technology lets calls “tunnel” from Wi-Fi access points, through the Internet, and onto a cellular network. From there, the calls will be tracked by the carriers billing system and forwarded along to their destination.

So its a Wifi solution that involves a carrier, which my guess involves T-Mobile since they aready play the WiFi hotspot game so well (and since that was the network the phone was associated with at CES). This would make sense in that it would allow T-Mobile to leverage its Wi-Fi network as a competitor to other carriers’ 3G high-speed cellular systems. With UMA, every home with a wireless LAN and every Starbucks becomes a place with full bars of signal, and that’s compelling.

Update:

My speculation that T-Mobile mobile would take advantage of WiFi integration with their handsets has proven to be a founded one. The Seattle Times is reporting that next week (probably during 3GSM) T-Mobile will introduce WiFi enabled phones with the goal of having them compete with with other (and their lack of) 3G networks in the US. These devices can thus take advantage of the one high-speed technology T-Mobile is known for: Wi-Fi networks in Starbucks, Hyatt hotels and other locations. This will include a new plan which includes unlimited EDGE network data (for the places you can’t get WiFi) usage and use of its T-Mobile Hotspot network for $30 a month on top of the subscriber’s regular voice plan.

The two phones that will have the Wifi are the SDA, which looks and feels like a phone, and the MDA, a handheld that has a large screen and pull-out keyboard.

Now you can see a little bit more clearly how much of an impact something like municipal WiFi can have on the mobile networks. [Thanks Jon]



And to top that all off, Philips also announced a DTM (dual transfer mode) solution which will enable simultaneous voice and data transfer over EDGE networks. Not only will this allow seamless transferring between WiFi and VoIP calls, but will enable things like video calling and simultaneous phone calling/Web browsing which are selling points for European 3G networks, and haven’t even been introduced here in the US yet.

“Though UMTS coverage is growing among major metro areas and highways, there will always be some white spots which will be covered by GSM/EDGE,” he said. “This allows operators to have the same experience in UMTS or EDGE coverage.”

The mobile VoIP revolution is upon us and we are witnessing the transitional stages. This is a key time to create a discussions around the subject. I enjoyed my conversation with Oliver and following his discussion of the topic while he was still over at Mobile-Weblog and Wireless Weblog.The mobile VoIP discourse has been pretty lackluster as of late and its up to someone to revive it. Im counting on you mobilists. I look forward to hearing your comments and participating in conversations about mobile VoIP both hear [spelt wrong on purpose to make the pun intended] and other mobile weblogs.

“Call Heard ‘Round the World, The: Voice Over Internet Protocol and the Quest for Convergence” (David Greenblatt)

Technorati Tags: 3gsm, carriers, CDMA, cellphone, EQO communications, google, gsm, mobile, mobile voip, municiple wifi, nasioncom, Oliver Starr, puppy, Royal Phillips Electronics, SIPquest, skype, symbian, tmobile, voip, wifi

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Cell Phones, The Networks, The Future, VoIP, WiFi, Infrastructure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.