VOIP

By Om Malik VoIP: Google’s GTalk will work at launch as an IM client but you wouldn’t be able to use it to make any voice calls. Since the OS is open, there are no restrictions on VoIP apps. T-Mobile has no restrictions on VoIP over Wi-Fi, but currently has no plans to support VoIP on their (3G) mobile networ...

By Om Malik Nokia’s N96 prompts me to ask the question: Where is Nokia’s touchscreen response to the iPhone? Samsung, LG and even tiny HTC have rolled out their versions of touchscreen devices. Sure, they aren’t very good, but at least they’re trying. Sony Ericsson today announced a new “panel” appro...

By Om Malik WiFi-based voice calls may not appear to make much sense in this era of $99, flat-rate unlimited plans, but when you have to make a lot of international long distance calls, the cost saving are humongous. I use Truphone on my iPhone and/or my Nokia e71 to make calls to my family and friends in I...

By Jason Harris While the emergence of VoIP, or voice-over-Internet protocol, technology has already helped push down the cost of making a phone call, now it’s starting to have a deflationary impact on the world of mobile, where call charges remain stubbornly high. Skype Options Mobile VoIP Players

By Paul Kapustka This isn’t to say that upstarts like Vonage and SunRocket had business models that made sense; but if you are going to publicly proclaim that there shouldn’t be regulation of communications, then why aren’t wireless providers being held to the same E911 standards as VoIP? A “light touch...

By Daniel Berninger New entrants like Ooma will spend far more on customer acquisition than incumbents ever have, because incumbents acquired their customers in a monopoly context and now need only invest in retaining them. Incumbents own the telephone network, too, which puts new entrants at their mercy...

By Om Malik On the issue of Voice calls, Truphone CEO James Tagg says, “This affects every new entrant into mobile telecommunications because the only company that can facilitate interconnection with T-Mobile is T-Mobile. It amounts to T-Mobile being able to veto a new entrant into the market. This...

By Om Malik A new improved version of Gizmo Project’s VoIP client for Nokia dual mode (WiFi+cellular) handsets is now available from the Nokia Labs website. It is worth the upgrade, since it has a lot of bug fixes compared to the previous version, which was built for Nokia N80 handset. The new version wo...

By Guest Column A carrier’s own VoIP service will always have an inherent advantage over that of a third party – it doesn’t have to go over the Internet. It’s debatable that going VoIP will make it less expensive for a carrier to offer voice than their current highly optimized circuit-switched networks, b...

By Blake Snow BT has a deal with Wi-Fi sharing service FON, and this service could play nicely with BT’s longer term plans. Om had reported that “the senior management of the British incumbent carrier was pretty bullish on the whole notion of dual-mode phones and municipal wireless. They talked about th...

By Paul Kapustka Certainly, toys like the USB Bluetooth headset (which Microsoft says will dual-home to VoIP and cellphones, a pledge that couldn’t be proven in the demo) from LG-Nortel will serve as momentary VoIP-candy, but there’s still a long road ahead of Microsoft in its attempts to A) convince en...

By Allan Leinwand FMC, among other things, allows your dual-mode mobile phone to seamlessly transfer a call between a cellular network and a Wi-Fi network using VoIP. The FMC advantages are that you get to use your dual-mode mobile phone in places where Wi-Fi coverage may be better than your provider’s cel...

By Om Malik April showers, they say, bring May flowers. But if you are an independent voice service provider, like Vonage and SunRocket, then in April, you were showered with just bad news, and May is more like Dis-May. Previous stories on SunRocket and Vonage.

By Om Malik Footnotes: 1. O. Kahane and S. Petrack, “Call Management Agent System: Requirements, Function, Architecture, and Protocol,” IMTC VoIP Forum, Seattle, Washington, January, 1997, 44 pages. (PDF) 3. Minutes of the VoIP Forum meeting. PDF

By Om Malik This shift of focus is good for Speakeasy’s wholesale broadband partner, Covad, which has the requisite infrastructure in place to service business customers, and could see an uptick in demand if Best Buy does actually manage to sell Speakeasy’s services alongside computers, phones...

By Paul Kapustka While there’s no shortage of opportunity in the VoIP SMB market, you have to wonder if Microsoft’s heart is truly behind this purposely limited offering, which will be marketed in fine brand-confusing fashion by the hardware partners. Microsoft claims it has satisfied beta customers a...

By Paul Kapustka Borislow, who claims to have provided most of MagicJack’s $17 million in funding from his own pockets, thinks there is a huge market for value-priced VoIP-based telephony, even though others like Vonage and Skype are revenue-challenged right now. “There’s a lot of people with fixed cos...

By Om Malik VoIP has been a protocol of choice for a while now, and that is why it is hard to understand the quality problems. While consumer facing services such as SunRocket and Vonage, the shoddy voice quality can be blamed on the broadband bandwidth constraints, the long distance carriers (owned b...

By Om Malik Share/E-mail Okay - this is just plain spooky: a few minutes after we published our Tello obit, a sharp reader emailed us to let us know that another VoIP service provider, GloPhone has gone the way of the rotary. Their website says that company closed its doors on March 13, 2007. Not surprisi...

By Om Malik We were not that sanguine about the company’s chances, given that it was in an increasingly crowded space where leviathans like Cisco, Avaya and lately Microsoft roam with abandon. Here are few lines from our original post: Buzzwords, and pedigree of the investors might help ensure head...

By Paul Kapustka Not a day goes by wihtout some large enterprise telephony/software company promising a blissful marriage of communications and business applications. (Wednesday Cisco and IBM were painting a picture of a new IP-enabled future, while Microsoft dreamed of billions from the same.)

By Paul Kapustka But you have to wonder if SunRocket’s service is such a lure that you would pass up some of the Skype cordless phones hitting the market, or this cool job from Philips. Or you just might wait for the promised Vonage Wi-Fi model, though you might miss a lot of calls in the meantime. (SunRocket sai...

By Paul Kapustka GrandCentral, the single-phone-number Web-based service launched last fall, is adding support for the free Gizmo Project Internet VoIP service, which may open up a whole new way to decrease spending on international or long-distance calling.

By Paul Kapustka Marco Limena: These are potentially much larger deals for us. While VoIP [contracts] are typically 50,000 or 60,000 licenses, you don’t do mobility for just thousands of users — it’s more like millions. So it’s very good, with deals of a much different scale.

By Om Malik The good news is that an increasing number of mobile phones will have Wi-Fi built in. Broadcom and Texas Instruments have recently introduced Wi-Fi chips that are optimized for mobile handsets that are more powerful and consume less battery power – a constant complaint with the dual mode...

By Om Malik Adobe Systems, now the owner of Flash multimedia technology, seems to be getting pretty serious about spreading its tentacles into new product categories – from VoIP to peer-to-peer networking. But it is P2P that is at the heart of San Jose, Calif.-based company’s grand design.

By Paul Kapustka “We’re embedding communications into the fabric of our customers’ core business,” said Avaya president and CEO Lou D’Ambrosio, who added that Ubiquity is “an important element as we extend that functionality in a SIP environment.” Expect to hear more IP telephony news when Cisco annou...

By Paul Kapustka It all kind of reminds me of the early days of cellular, when AT&T innovated (!) by introducing nationwide dialing plans with no roaming fees. It was such a no-brainer idea that every competitor had to follow. Maybe the new wave of minute-stealing businesses that VCs are pouring cash in...

By Om Malik Many new technologies — like VHS and DVDs, and more recently Video over the Internet — owe no small part of their early success to adult entertainment, which spurred people to jump through technological hoops they might not have otherwise. As long as no laws are broken, why shouldn’t VoIP b...

By Om Malik The trials and tribulations of the competitive voice service provides such as Vonage, have forced venture investors to look at startups that marry VoIP to mobile phones. Any application that can lower the high mobile phone tariffs can quickly gain traction. And that is enough for investo...

By Om Malik That is, if you don’t take into account the marketing costs, which even Arnold acknowledges, remain a problem for Vonage. Take for instance this recent promotion we received from Vonage. They want us to come back to service and they would give us two months for free. Or about a $50 discount, so...

By Om Malik Outbound and inbound calls use the voice channel, and connect to the PSTN network. There is no voice quality degradation, typically a problem with mobile VoIP offerings. Those who are receiving your call can only see your virtual phone ID.

By Om Malik And now Adobe Systems wants to replicate its success in video space in the Voice over the Internet (VoIP) arena, making it easy to embed voice into web applications. GigaOM has learnt of a secret start-up project currently being incubated by the $1.9 billion in annual sales software giant. S...

By Om Malik Aswath isn’t going to be thrilled with the headline, but I am still calling it VoIP. Cable giant, thanks to some aggressive marketing and bundling has managed to chalk up a million digital voice (VoIP) customers. The growth has been so good that the company is adding 4000 jobs. Yet another pro...

By Om Malik The data should not be a surprise given the continuing land line losses at phone companies. AT&T, for instance lost about 426,000 lines - 106,000 additional lines (mostly used for dial up and fax) and 320,000 primary lines, reflecting the reality of continued migration of phone line...

By Om Malik Talking about waiting in the wings, our good friend, Andy Abramson has picked up a rumor that Yahoo might be announcing a similar service at VoN. Of course, Yahoo is in the habit of announcing early, but we know they mean well. 

Since it is the eve of VoN, it is not surprising that tips and rumor...

By Om Malik It is nice to see big media wake up to the Skype side of the story, even though they had been prebriefed ahead of the news. Google and eBay deal announced earlier today is going to have even bigger ramifications for the VoIP world. Google Talk team is talking about interoperating with Skype. Jus...