There seems to be a sudden upswing in interest in full cellular VoIP at the moment, after everything went quiet in the summer. Last week we had the fring/Mobilkom announcement, and I also had an interesting chat with Ross Brennan at Cicero Networks about VCC and the challenges of hand-off from LTE or WiMAX VoIP back to mobile circuit telephony.
Yesterday I spotted VoIPo3G being used on a notebook "in the wild" by an ordinary consumer.
And next up is the iPhone.
Tip of the hat to Alex Kerr over at Forum Oxford (and www.phonething.com ) for pointing me towards the first (?) implementation of VoIPo3G on the Apple device, albeit only with a jailbroken one.
Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Thought-leading wireless industry analysis
And it will stay at jailbroken apps (there is more than one already) as long as Apple snuggles up to mobile providers and their PSTN plans. The international iPhone 3G is even less likely to break with this policy because there is just too much interest in keeping things the way they are for the time being.
ReplyDeleteMS crippled their VoIP implementation on WM for the same reason, but they distanced themselves far enough from what's actually running on the devices and the carriers so that they do not (have to) care whether or not 3rd party applications enable VoIPo3G.
In short: There will be no official VoIPo3G application on the iPhone 3G... ever! Maybe on the Apple's next device in a couple of years when carriers have finally left PSTN for good, but before that I just don't see it happening.