Truly Wireless Offers VoIP-Like Enterprise Calling-via Cellular

There are plenty of VoIP and unified communications clients available for smartphones, and IP PBXs often offer mobile extensions to accomplish things like four-digit dialing from mobile devices. But a start-up called Truly Wireless wants to take a little of the zing out of the IP world by offering advanced enterprise calling features across the cellular network.

The company has officially come out of beta after a year of development. True to its name, Truly Wireless, eschews IP in favor of supporting caller ID, call-forwarding, auto attendant, music on hold, conferencing, visual voicemail, integrated messaging and more using mobile networks. Considering that over-the-top (OTT) IP services tend to be much cheaper or even free compared to mobile network services, a clear question to ask is, what’s the point?

In a blog post helpfully entitled Eight Reasons Why We’re Betting on Cellular Voice, Erol Toker, a former Google product manager and the founder and CEO at the company, pointed out the company’s value prop perception issue. “When we first decided to build a next-generation phone system on the wireless carrier networks, our peers were skeptical,” he said. “It’s not hard to see why; telecom companies are still viewed as monopolistic incumbents, and the ‘Plain Old Telephone System’ (POTS) is seen as a legacy platform not capable of supporting innovation.”

But he pointed out that more competition, ongoing infrastructure investments and new technologies have contributed to affordable calling, significant improvements in service coverage and a range of devices capable of supporting rich and interconnected experiences on the POTS. And perhaps most importantly, cellular networks offer a level of call quality and redundancy that VoIP can’t match for now.

The first and biggest trouble with mobile VoIP is the fact that calls are made over unmanaged links—using the open, best-efforts internet. That can contribute to jitter and delay and echoes—all of which can kill real-time communications services like voice and video. And when it comes to business communications, call quality matters.

The other consideration is that OTT applications always take a back seat to mobile services. “They are interrupted by incoming carrier calls and are frequently killed in the background by mobile operating systems,” pointed out Toker. “This is no accident; OS manufacturers and carriers have competing interests (FaceTime, 3G calling) and see most VoIP apps as a source of poor user experience. As a result, a mobile device’s native phone app remains the most reliable way to make and receive phone calls.”

Also, cellular provides simplicity.  

“Any SMB experiencing growth or moving offices will tell you just how painful and expensive it is to build, monitor and maintain a voice network on-premise,” Toker said. “Cellular services are the equivalent of the ‘cloud’ for voice networks, handling capacity management, redundancy, monitoring and coverage, hiding much of this complexity from the SMB.”

And indeed, the set-up for the service is straightforward: administrators can use a centralized portal to assign phone numbers and hunt groups, set up an auto-attendant and so on, and employees need only to download an app for either iOS or Android. The service is integrated with the four national carriers (Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile). Pricing starts at $7 per user per month.

Investors seem to like the idea. The company announced $1.4 million in seed funding. The round was led by Index ventures, Greylock Partners and Boldstart Ventures, with participation from ENIAC ventures and angel investors.