Dual Mode Handset Update

Dual mode handsets have WiFi (News - Alert) as well as cellular radios. Handset WiFi has exploded in 2008; over half the smartphones shipped this year will have WiFi, and the proportion will approach 80 percent in 2009.

I recently test-drove a voice over WiFi service running on back-end equipment from DiVitas (News - Alert). The phone was a Nokia E71. When the voice was running over WiFi the audio quality was excellent, way better than cellular quality could ever be. So my immediate impulse was to load the DiVitas software onto my iPhone (News - Alert).

It turns out that of the hundreds of dual-mode phones on the market, almost none handle voice well over WiFi. Windows Mobile phones have problems with the handset audio path and fast secure roaming. The iPhone doesn’t multi-task, so it can’t properly receive VoIP calls, and if you are on a VoIP call when a cellular call arrives the VoIP call drops. The Google Android (News - Alert) phone doesn’t expose enough information through the WiFi API to allow a VoIP client to make hand-off decisions. The Java environment in Blackberries doesn’t expose enough functionality to third-party programmers to create VoIP clients. That leaves the Symbian (News - Alert)-based phones. Most of these are from Nokia. Nokia includes a SIP stack in all their Eseries and Nseries phones, and until recently a softphone application as well.

While it’s not trivial to make Voice-over-WiFi work well on a phone, why has only Nokia (News - Alert) bothered to do so? Cell phones are sold mainly through cellular service providers, so the phone manufacturers are highly responsive to the carriers’ influence. Voice services are the carriers’ bread and butter. Non-UMA voice over WiFi enables customers to bypass the carriers’ billing systems. Naturally, the carriers are unenthusiastic.

Until the iPhone, carriers were as paranoid about WiFi for data as they were about WiFi for voice. But iPhones turned out to use the data WAN heavily in addition to the WiFi. Now the only major U.S. hold-out against WiFi is Verizon (News - Alert). Its latest quarterly report shows 30 percent of new customers choosing smartphones, so its “no-WiFi policy” doesn’t seem to have hurt it yet. IT

Michael Stanford (News - Alert) has been an entrepreneur and strategist in Voice-over-IP for over a decade. Visit his blog at www.wirevolution.com.

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