John Linton
.....but this time thinking through how to deal with the slimiest 'competitors' before spending the money.
We have been attempting to source/write a realistically configurable and easily usable 'universal' application to allow an end user to use VoIP over their mobile telephone via data rather than pay the mobile call costs - which, capped plans or not, are much higher than the 10 cent unlimited length call to any local or national number provided by VoIP. Even a 15 cent a minute call to mobile is much lower than the vast majority of mobile tariffs and of course a 5 cent to 8 cent SMS is much lower than 'standard' mobile rates. Then there are international calls at two or so cents a minute via VOIP versus the enormously high costs via mobile tariffs. So, clearly a compelling case to provide an application that will allow a mobile handset user to do this....but absolutely not in the mobile carrier's interests in allowing this to happen given the decade and a half practice of giving away handsets and recovering the cost via 24 month lock in contracts and sky high mobile rates.
I have used Fring, Nimbuzz and our own beta versions of VoIP over HSPA for over a year now and have never had a problem that couldn't be solved by a re-dial. However my use of a mobile phone is pretty much restricted to making and receiving calls and I don't even keep an address book of 'most called' numbers as I figure that if I can't remember the number then there really is no point in calling the person concerned....and I realise I'm a one off weirdo mobile phone user so my experience, other than determining call clarity in different circumstances is irrelevant. Our other testers, both inside and outside the company, continued to have criticisms of the software we developed so we have never been able to make VoIP over HSPA a commercial 'product' up to now.
As time has passed there are an increasing number of third party developers who have produced their versions of a 'full blown' MoIP application and, in despair of ever writing our own application we have selected one of those products to test and see if it does address all of the criticisms/lack of function that we have been unable to overcome. My testing this week indicates that it does even forcing me to implement some of the functions I personally would never use. It will take a further 6 - 8 weeks to actually turn the testing phase into a deliverable product but we have now decided to do that with the hope that we can deliver the product, a year late, in January 2010.
Our liking of this concept is, ignoring my personal dislike of "capped plans", that we can sell a data service for mobile users that provides a mobile call service over HSPA at a fraction of any other mobile call plan they currently use. As we have no current commitment with any mobile carrier that involves us in selling mobile plans with "caps" or other "minimum" monthly usage restrictions we have far more 'freedom' than any of the current carriers or their wholesale channels. After our recent experiences with dealing with this problem in our first major marketing of HSPA this is more than a bonus - it's an absolute requirement. Doubtless I will make some major error of judgment in this replacement strategy as I did in the first one but I will take the sliminess of some competitors into account this time.
I think the call costs, including 2 cents a minute calls to ten or so 'popular' countries from a mobile handset that has an application that installs in less than a minute once the HSPA service has been activated is a very attractive proposition for private users but it is 'blow you away' offer for business users combining the values of calls between employee mobiles are uncharged, calls from the employees mobiles to their office telephone numbers are uncharged and there are no minimum spends and no contracts......but if I go on I'll give too much away to the Exetel copyists. Suffice to say, as we push further into the corporate market the ability to integrate high speed Ethernet data, VoIP for general business telephone services, business mobile handset data and VoIP services and SMS from the data base and other sources.
So I'm happy with the product I'm using and the other testers no longer criticise the lack of features and facilities that were shortcomings of our own developments so maybe Exetel can finally offer the very best and by far the lowest cost mobile service in Australia after over five years of trying. I see no reason, based on my usage to date, that Exetel's mobile offering in 2010 will be even more cost effective than our broadband offerings have always been.
Maybe I've got more hard lessons to learn?