John Linton I finally got an HSPA mobile handset yesterday and tried it out from my home (which has a terrible mobile signal and even worse HSPA - my eldest daughter's Telstra HSPA data service barely works in our lounge room), in a taxi from Mosman to the city and in a restaurant with thick walls and in high rise 'shadow'. The VoIP/Fring call performance was indistinguishable from a land line (even as the taxi drove over the Harbour Bridge) let alone a mobile so I'm looking forward to testing the ongoing quality over the next few weeks.
I ported my number to the new hand set, a painless and quick process as my previous carrier was Vodafone, and transferred my 'address books' via Outlook - again a simple process. One of the advantages of the Exetel HSPA VoIP service is that it comes with a DID so that other people can call me without incurring the costs of a mobile call - and if they have VoIP (either from Exetel or from any other VoIP provider) then they can call my mobile from/to anywhere in Australia for 10 cents for an untimed call.
So the 'theory' has survived its first hurdle - it's possible to reduce mobile call costs dramatically by using VoIP without any degredation in quality. Having said that I would think that Sydney's Lower North Shore and Sydney CBD would have as good a mobile coverage as anywhere in Australia despite what my friend Tom P is quoted in the press as saying. As I recently pointed out to him, if VoIP doesn't work in a particular 'black hole, the 'standard mobile rates' provided with the service are very low and overcome the objection of VoIP sometimes 'not working'. I failed to convince him as he said, somewhat petulantly I thought, that "I just want to make calls not waste time selecting a different service". Poor man - it must be tough to be so time starved and so wealthy that avoiding a few seconds of 'inconvenience' every so often is worth paying 300% more for.
We have bought 12 HSPA hand sets for various Exetel support and provisioning people and will put the service through a few hoops next week in terms of:
1. Establishing a VPN between all handsets and all Exetel data base facilities (another plus of the Exetel HSPA service is providing a static IP).
2. Providing firewalled 'ring tone' connectivity to our Mitel VoIP PBX to allow calls to and from the Sri Lankan office to be made at no charge.
3) Widening the testing of coverage across most of metropolitan Sydney and Perth followed by the NSW Central Coast area and the ACT.
4) Getting the service to work in Sri Lanka (I'm working from Colombo next week) and therefore in other countries as easily as possible.
5) Finalising getting Fring servers located in Australia
6) Determining how close NimBuzz is to a bug free implementation
So - it's more than a 'new toy' if we can thoroughly confirm that HSPA via a mobile hand set will do all of these things easily and reliably over a wide geographic area. One thing appears certain - if it can do all these things right now the coverage, 'speed' and 'bandwidth' will only get better over time.
Maybe Exetel's almost three year 'search' for the ultimate business and residential user service that can be provided by a small communications company better than a carrier or carrier 'wannabe' is reaching an end - one way or another? Or maybe a carrier/carrier wannabe will be able to duplicate the key components of my understanding of what's needed:
Solid VoIP at sensible rates, "Planless" HSPA with pay for what you use at low rates, Fixed IP, DID, Free Calls between 'user groups', 5 cent SMS, Abilty to send and receive faxes, Global roaming at realistic rates, ........11 other things we haven't yet found a reliable source for but know where to find over the coming months.
Somehow, and for different reasons for each possible Australian provider, I don't think there is any other company, large or small, that is able to do all the things that such a service requires (it has taken us over two years to put those first eight things in place and we have really good programmers and very good project management) - or we beleive requires.
An exciting few months.