Friday, September 5. 2008No More Mobile Marketing 'Lies'?John Linton Some 14 years ago I had a demonstration of using a standard Telstra 64k ISDN line (Yes, Virginia - indeed there was a time when Telstra deemed 64kbps to be a super fast premium business only service at a mere $A900.00 per month for line between Sydney and Melbourne) to make 6 simultaneous voice calls from Sydney to Melbourne and at the same time carry data traffic between two computers. This was using a new telephony technology called 'compression', a new voice telephony service called voice via Internet Protocol and a pair of 'magic boxes'. It was a stunning demonstration and heralded the start of breaking the Telstra through the roof high costs for business of making interstate telephone calls and of connecting interstate offices to head office data base facilities. It was the beginning of a true revolution for business that some 8 years later began to filter through to residential users and that today is now very common and has spelled the end of the telephone charge/line rental monopoly rip off. Yesterday - I had a demonstration of similar, perhaps greater, impact (at least on me) that will complete the telephone voice revolution and the pricing tyranny that goes with all monopolies. I had a demonstration of using VoIP over HSPA (handset was a Nokis N95) as part of putting in place the final details of preparing to make HSPA services available later this month. I was very impressed - that is an understatement. I made test calls to land lines and mobiles, in Sydney and interstate and also called a mobile overseas and the quality of the voice, on both ends, was equal to or actually better than a PSTN call. It was a stunning realization of something that should have been possible but I never expected such an amazingly good result. At this stage we have decided to use a small Israeli/USA start up company called 'fring' to provide the very, very simple method of enabling any 3G mobile hand set to make VoIP calls and, at this time, this does incur a 400 to 500 millisecond delay as the fring servers we are using are on the West Coast of the USA. However this is a very minor aspect of the performance and we are in the process of addressing that issue by locating 'fring' severs and switches in our PoPs. If the 3G coverage (Optus, Vodafone, Telstra and possibly "3") is as good as it is in North Sydney then I can't see any sensible person paying for "mobile capped plans" or the rest of that dreary set of marketing lies for too much longer. Of course, 3G is not universal at the moment but, if you believe the public statements by the three main mobile network providers it will be pretty much everywhere in Australia pretty soon. So.....a true revolution in the pricing of mobile telephone calls is at hand? In my simple testing yesterday I used the Exetel VoIP service which has end user calls of 10 cents per call to any Australian land line and 30 cents per minute to any Australian mobile number. To those costs would have to be added the HSPA IP charges which, and this is a rough guess, amount to around 1.5 cents per minute at the most - but I have no firm figures as yet. So my three minute calls from a mobile to Australian land lines were costing me, at the most, 14.5 cents and my six minute mobile call cost me $1.89. By using 'fring' I could call another 'fring' enabled mobile at ZERO COST other than the approximately 1.5 cents per minute for the IP traffic. These costs are, of course, a fraction of the costs of ANY mobile carrier in Australia no matter how many "capped" options they offer. So this the end of mobile call high prices (at least for people with more than two brain cells). Or is it? I was reminded that, at least currently, the Apple iPhone couldn't be used to make mobile calls as it had been specifically requested to have this function 'barred' by the carriers and this was a condition of them distributing the product. Similarly there is talk that Nokia, Ericcson, Samsung etc are being pressured by the same major carriers to do the same on all 3G capable models they release in the future to protect their exorbitant pricing and therefore their exorbitant profits from mobile usage. I have absolutely no information that is the case but it is a very pervasive 'rumour'. So there is some doubt that the widespread ability to use VoIP over an HSPA/3G mobile network is in some doubt at the moment - but only because one or more mobile carriers will artificially make it impossible procedurally - apart from coverage in an area there is no doubt it can be done technically and operationally. It would need a consistent 'toeing the line' agreement by the four Australian network carriers to make that happen (otherwise they would be disadvantaged competitively) which, as far as I'm aware, is a go to gaol offence under corporations law in this country. What must be really terrifying carriers like Telstra and Optus is that their hyper lucrative business users would be able to halve or quarter their mobile telephone bills using free mobile to mobile facilities via 'fring' (or a similar service) let alone massively reducing the general costs of mobile calls. Oh - and then of course they can also use a service like Exetel's SMS via email on a mobile handset to eliminate that other 'money for nothing' mobile service called high priced SMS. I have little doubt that, lead by Telstra, there will be a great deal of 'obstruction' to using VoIP over HSPA in Australia (remember the 'rumours' in the US of carriers "de-prioritising" VoIP traffic on the IP networks to protect their voice call and line rental revenues?) - but - "I have seen the future of mobile calls and it's VOIP".
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
To date the biggest problem with Fring for an Australian user has been the routing via the US, if you are bringing Fring to our shores though then this is a huge step forward and will open up this service to a very large audience, finally we are getting somewhere with good data deals and services we can use
Comments (5)
Personally, I didn't find the slight delay an issue - but I'm sure you're correct in saying that some people would.
Comments (3)
The delay with Fring can vary depending on handset, something like an N95 that supports HSPA fare better than an E65 that only supports WCDMA, once you start routing locally though I think it should make enough difference that the older handsets can perform a lot better than they did in the past, will be interested to try this out anyway
Comments (5)
newish nokia phones come with support for voip built in.
look up internet-telephony on your phone. Comment (1)
Didn't a number of Three Mobiles come with Skype built in?
Comment (1)
The Skype handsets that 3 use don't actually use data to do the Skype calls, the calls are routed through a gateway number (kind of like a 1800 number) and then routed over the net, this is done using iskoot http://www.iskoot.com/ the routing through the gateway like this restricts them from using Skype Out to make calls outside of the Skype network, the carriers don't mind the Skype to Skype stuff but the restrict it so that you still need to make regular phone calls through them
Comments (5)
I have read that UK provider O2 restrict their branded 3G phones from being able to use VOIP. However open market handsets are able to use VOIP over 3G.
Comment (1)
I found that was the case when I was in the UK.
(O2 = BT = 'Telstra') Comments (3)
I've used fring many times to call the US from my n95. Was especially useful when I was in hospital and needed to call people all over the country and some international. The best part was the integration with skype and msn, and I find the fring client far more reliable and friendly than the skype client and by being able to switch, i could choose the best voice quality. it didn't even make a dent on my data bill, and didn't exceed the monthly "free" data allowance.
Bring forth the VOIP via HSPA world. though getting HSPA handsets will be the problem!! Buying outright will be the way to go, to avoid the networks, and they're not cheap. Comment (1)
There are an increasing number of companies offering such services. Get your daughter to check out Truphone on the iPhone - the call costs appear to bevery similar.
Comment (1)
Truphone is a Wi-Fi only VoIP app for the iPhone (as per Apple requirement) which does limit things a little, the service is also based overseas so there is added latency for the calls, there are some other similar apps coming for the iPhone which will be locally based which might be more suitable once they arrive
Comments (5)
I found the Nokia Native voip service performed better than fring but that might be due to the native service using the exetel serves while fring uses us servers.
Also penny-tel offer 8 cent local calls and 38.8 cent mobile calls on the $5 plan. So if you call a lot this may provide even cheaper service. Comment (1)
My findings were also the same however this may change once Exetel can route Fring locally (this has been a long time issue for Fring use in Australia and personally I think it's a big win on Exetel's behalf to go this way), I will certainly be giving it a good go anyway
Comments (5)
Personally, I've used VoIP on an N95 for a year now and have introduced the same to others.
I don't use Fring, nor do I use or support Skype. I prefer to keep things as standard as possible and support the SIP protocol exclusively. My use was at one stage through Truphone (whilst it was basically free) and also through a number of VoIP services using Voxalot. The Voxalot situation now has a cost, but it isn't great and I can still use various VoIP service providers through Voxalot at zero or low cost. Voxalot to Voxalot is free as is any service that supports Sipbroker which is run by the same people whom run Voxalot. You can find more information on my website that relates to this information here: http://www.affinityvision.com.au/voip-notes-detailed.html Keep in mind that this needs some updates, I hope it is useful for some you your readers It would be good if Exetel VoIP services had the ability to forward at no cost to a Voxalot SIP URI and not require SIP registration. Truphone is now far too expensive to use, but that doesn't stop me using alternative VoIP services at reasonable and acceptable cost. Oh and when I got my N95, I specifically purchased it outright so that there was no possibility of it being knobbled by the likes of phone company branding and removal of features. At the time of the purchase, it was known that Vodafone in the UK had disabled VoIP features and they were more or less forced to remove that limitation after some uproar. Vodafone Australia stated that they wouldn't go down that track; in the end I thought it was safer and more prudent to simply buy my N95 outright, without contracts and with everything that Nokia intended to work on it. Kind Regards AndrewM Comment (1)
|
Calendar
QuicksearchArchivesCategoriesBlog AdministrationExternal PHP Application |