PortaOne PortaSwitch Playing Role in Market Shift Away from Cellular Voice Service

The trend of terminating landline service and using their mobile phones as their primary means of communication is well established among U.S. consumers. Mobile service has become more reliable and inexpensive, making traditional landline service obsolete to them.

Having made the switch from landlines to mobile phones for voice calls, consumers are now using their mobile phones differently. One reason is that more users (especially millennials) prefer texting and messaging to making voice calls.

Another reason is that when users make voice calls, a growing number of them are using alternatives to cellular voice service like VoIP, VoLTE, and VoWiFi. Cisco has predicted that more than half of voice traffic in North America will be over Wi-Fi connections by 2019.

This trend is evident in the plans offered by service providers and the equipment that makes it possible. PortaOne, for example has developed the PortaSwitch software platform that has a softswitch that manages the switching and other technical work that goes into the operational side of making a call, and billing capabilities that deal with the business side.

Exridge, a telecom solutions provider in Europe and Asia, offers a smartphone app that combines the technology behind the PortaSwitch with a white label softphone solution developed by Acrobits that used Exridge branding. According to Acrobits’ cloudsoftphone.com site, vendors wanting to use its platform can easily set up the service with their own branding in 24 hours.

A number of factors are combining in such a way that the shift away from cellular voice service should only continue to grow:

• ZDNet alludes to a growing market of freelancers in the U.S., who would benefit from using softphone technology on their smartphones. Among other benefits, it allows them to have separate personal and business phone numbers.
• VoLTE technology does not use data and cellular packets separately, but instead treats any activity requiring a mobile connection as data packets, whether it’s a voice call, web browsing, or downloading a file.
• Roaming charges are becoming less of an issue in the European Union, thus reducing the sticker shock that could come from making frequent VoIP calls over a smartphone.

As this technology grows, smartphones effectively become personal UC devices: there will soon be no distinction between voice and data, allowing anyone to communicate seamlessly through any number of methods.

Edited by Maurice Nagle