VoIP - Beyond Digital POTS

I've been involved with VoIP technology since 1996.  I've been a public advocate for wideband audio at least since 1997.  And I've admired and supported a variety of companies using VoIP to provide innovative services and new user interfaces.  But reflecting on the past decade, the only globally significant impact of VoIP has been on prices (by fostering arbitrage).  Most VoIP telephony services are just digital POTS.

Indeed, the most significant change in telephony in the past decade has been the global spread of mobile phones.

But we may be on the cusp of a real change due to the merger of VoIP and mobile as I discussed in my monthly column, entitled Beyond Digital POTS, in the April issue of Internet Telephony magazine.  Check the article for further info, but I concluded with:

The remaining impediments are walled gardens or expensive data plans, and handset diversity that means most applications won’t run on most handsets. Mobile competition, WiFi hotspots and ever increasing 3G capabilities should put an end to walled gardens within two to five years. Handset diversity will be with us, perhaps indefinitely, but a few powerful frameworks are gaining ground at different levels of abstraction, e.g.Symbian and Windows Mobile at a base level, J2ME as middleware and Flash Lite and Opera & Safari browsers with AJAX. There won’t be a single API to write to (like Windows for the PC), but it should be possible to produce slick user interfaces across a wide variety of phones with a proxy server and five or six downloadable modules.

VoIP and mobile — now there’s an opportunity for innovation!

Comments

[Al Krauza]

WHAT IS MORE INNOVATIVE THAN PROVIDING FREE VOIP CALLING TO THE WORLD?

- - Comment abbreviated by Brough to remove advertising for AdCalls PC-to-Phone service. - -

For more information contact:
Al Krauza. President
AdCalls, Inc.
alk@adcalls.com
949-305-3050

[VoIPReviewer]

I'm curious if the current phone companies with their respective mobile phone companies, would try to block mobile voip. Don't these companies basically hold the keys and guard the gates to all of our telecommunications. Other wise I would guess that it would take a company with some deep pockets to provide mobile voip.
I might not have a full grasp of the entire industry, but a case in point in Europe is that I read Vodafone disabled the WiFi capabilities of the Nokia N series phones sold through their stores.

[brough]

Al, I don't like being spammed with advertising, but since you began your promotional comment with a question that does relate to the post and since you signed your name, let me treat it as a serious comment. Innovation is usually thought of as some combination of invention and implementation or commercialization. The point is that it's new. Using VoIP for arbitrage was new in the 1990s and PC-to-Phone capabilities were pioneered by ITXC (now part of TeleGlobe) and iBasis who began offering global PC2Phone capabilities on a wholesale basis. These wholesale services fostered numerous PC2Phone retail services, again beginning in the second half of the 1990s. If your comment was serious, it missed the whole point of the article.

[brough]

VoIPReviewer,

I fully expect mobile companies to block mobile VoIP, for a while. However, unlike the monopoly or duopoly structure of fixed line Internet access, mobile connectivity is somewhat competitive in the US, much of the EU and many other parts of the world. I'm pinning my hopes on competition. Time permitting, I'll write a longer post on why this makes sense (at least for the mobile market in the US over the next 3-5 years).

Yes, Vodafone has disabled WiFi on the N series phones that they subsidize. But you can purchase the same phone for full price and have WiFi working. Assuming adequate disclosure (here provided by the blogshphere!), the consumer gets to make an open market decision. Do I want the phone at a discount but w/o WiFi?, or do I want to the full functionality at the higher price?

[Alex]

Not WiFi capability - SIP capability.

[VoIP services]

If you wanna learn more about VoIP services I recommend you to have a look at the articles on my web site just clicking on the link. Thanks