Wifi Revolution

Mobile VoIP provider Truphone (News - Alert) announced yesterday that it has successfully ported FreeSWITCH’s open source telephony application code to TelcoBridges’ hardware platform to fulfill its need for a media gateway which can bridge VoIP calls between the Internet and the Public Switched Telephone Network.

Truphone’s SIP-based mobile VoIP service is delivered via WiFi (News - Alert). The development of a PSTN media gateway is key addition to its service because calls initiated on Truphone’s IP network can now be bridged to the PSTN. That means users of Truphone’s mobile VoIP service can make calls to traditional land lines and vice versa. Calls originating from the PSTN are transcoded from G.711 to the AMR voice codec and bridged to IP. The gateway uses SIP signaling to establish and tear down the VoIP connections on the IP network and SS7 signaling to initiate and release calls on the TDM side.

“Truphone selected TelcoBridges’ (News - Alert) enabling technologies to build the carrier-grade PSTN media gateway they need,” explained Gaetan Campeau, president, founder and EVP of sales for TelcoBridges Inc., in a press release. “After careful study of the available options, it was TelcoBridges’ innovative technologies and carrier-grade architecture, coupled with FreeSWITCH’s open source telephony applications that were chosen to realize this key portion of their network.”

James Body, network director of Truphone, said “scalability, reliability and support for the AMR voice codec were the key decision criteria for Truphone when selecting our media gateway solution. We found all this with TelcoBridges’ platform.”

Anthony Minessale II, creator of FreeSWITCH, said his company’s open source telephony platform was designed “to be able to withstand the burden of media and transcoding but with the foresight to be able to control devices that can do it for you.”

“TelcoBridges is the perfect compliment to our software and a prime example of how to use it in a high-density environment,” he said in the release.

In other news, Truphone is reportedly mulling the idea of taking legal action against Vodafone, the world’s largest wireless carrier, for allegedly “blocking” mobile VoIP calls on its network.

Vodafone recently announced new rates and terms of use for the data portion of its network which exclude the transmission of VoIP calls over that portion of its network. This could be a critical blow to Truphone and other mobile VoIP operators because its service not only relies on WiFi networks for connecting VoIP calls but also the data portion of a carrier’s 3G network.

Meanwhile, large carriers like Vodafone see services such as Truphone’s as a threat to their cellular service – their main source of revenue - because Truphone is able to connect calls for less money via VoIP – thus giving it and other small mobile VoIP start-ups a huge competitive advantage over the big carriers.

UK carrier Orange also recently announced that it, too, was excluding VoIP and instant messaging (IM) from its new data tariffs.

Ironically, both Vodafone and Orange have actually lowered the rates for using the data portion of their 3G networks. This would normally be an advantage to mobile VoIP players, however, the fact the Vodafone and Orange are blocking VoIP from their networks is in fact a major blow to the small mobile VoIP startups.

In a report published on Red Herring, Carl Lyons, Truphone marketing director, said his company might take legal action against Vodafone. As the report points out, this could be the beginning of a major legal battle because it is likely that multiple other small mobile VoIP start-ups will end up joining the fight.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., VoIP service provider Skype (News - Alert) has already asked the Federal Communications Commission to force mobile carriers such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless to open up their networks to independent providers of mobile VoIP.

In a related development, Truphone said it was mulling the idea of bringing a lawsuit against Orange and Vodafone in April, after the two mobile operators reportedly disabled the VoIP capability on their branded Nokia N95 handsets.

When Truphone discovered that Orange and Vodafone had removed the standard Nokia VoIP capabilities from their branded N95 handsets, it cried foul and publicly called the move as a “threat to mobile net neutality.” Although the Nokia phones in question still allow for branded software enabling VoIP services and other applications to be installed, Orange and Vodafone have reportedly gone out of their way to remove the standard VoIP client that comes with the phones "out-of-the-box" (basically, the Internet Telephony menu option has been removed).

In a statement released April 23, Truphone implied that the move by Orange and Vodafone is tantamount to blocking its service.

“The removal by two of the UK’s mobile network operators of VoIP functionality from Nokia’s flagship handset, the Nokia N95, constitutes a major threat to mobile net neutrality that should concern all mobile phone users,” the company said in the statement. “Net neutrality (News - Alert) has been critical to innovation on the web to date. In particular, the way people shop, learn, communicate and work would be very different if Internet access wasn¹t neutral.”

“Net neutrality means that - for example - broadband providers do not lock customers into specific products, services or content controlled by that provider,” the statement read. “It’s because of net neutrality that businesses such as Ebay, MySpace, or Amazon have thrived when, if their exposure had been confined to small uncompetitive Œwalled gardens,¹ available only to a proportion of Internet users, they may never have achieved their global popularity and current success.”

“Preventing consumer choice is protectionism in disguise - it’s subsidy abuse,” said James Tagg, CEO of Truphone, in the statement. “We’re at the dawn of the mobile internet era and consumers should get an open playing field and not a walled garden. If the mobile network operators start blocking services they don’t like there will be no incentive for anyone to innovate. You may own the handset, but they’ll own you.”

However, it has been pointed out that mobile operators in fact do own the networks which they operate - and to a certain degree they do have the right to limit how their networks are used. A simple example of this is the handsets themselves - mobile operators have the right to sell handsets which are pre-loaded with software which connects them only to their networks - not their competitors’ networks. Although consumers can buy phones which are not pre-loaded with the operator’s software, they can’t connect to the network until they have the software, and it is typically not feasible to preload a phone with multiple software clients from multiple operators. In this sense, consumers are already limited in terms of which networks they can connect to.

Still, Tagg said to disable the standard VoIP functionality on these phones is tantamount to “a removal of customer choice,” and that could be the basis for a lawsuit (or it could at least raise the ire of some lawmakers).

“We believe Vodafone’s stance is not lawful, and we are considering our position,” Tagg was quoted as saying in a published report in April. He said Vodafone is not only disabling Internet telephony on Nokia handsets, but it is also failing to meet interconnection obligations and blocking competing websites (specifically, he said Skype’s website is being blocked).

Tagg also asserted that Vodafone is refusing to connect calls to Truphone’s range of mobile numbers, which is a violation of UK telecommunications laws.

Truphone holds a registry of numbers which it can assign to its customers, thus enabling it to function as a mobile operator unto itself. These numbers appear in a phone’s call log and can receive SMS messages, however, according to Truphone, the numbers are being blocked, regardless of whether the caller is placing the calls via the Vodafone/Orange networks or over WiFi.

In response to the allegations made in April, Vodafone said in a statement, “Customers can download VoIP applications if they choose to do so or can use VoIP services via a laptop and data card.”

Indeed, other VoIP services - including those offered by fring and WiFiMobile - continue to work on the Nokia N95 on Vodafone and Orange’s networks - so it can be argued that the two carriers aren’t really blocking VoIP, per se, they’re just removing the ability for the phones to support Truphone’s service, which relies on the standard VoIP software supplied by Nokia in order to operate.

“Vodafone believes that VoIP-over-mobile is not yet a mature service proposition as it does not have guaranteed quality of service, and would fall short of the customer experience demanded of any service we launch,” the statement from Vodafone said. “To ensure a solid end-to-end customer experience, this service would require in-depth testing, billing integration and customer service support which is currently not available.”

In other words, the data portion of both carriers’ network simply does not have the capacity to handle an influx of VoIP calls - or at least there would be poor sound quality resulting from a lack of network resources (for which the carrier would more than likely be blamed). Furthermore, Vodafone pointed out that it has not yet had the opportunity to test the standard VoIP software which comes with the Nokia N95 phones for quality and reliability on its network.

“There is also a misleading perception that VoIP services are ‘free,’” the statement reads. “This is not the case when it comes to using VoIP over mobile, where customers will need to use data connectivity to establish a service. By doing this, there is a risk that customers could incur unnecessary charges when competitive mobile tariffs are likely to be a more cost-effective choice.”

This is an interesting dispute and how it plays out could end up setting a major precedent for how mobile VoIP providers deliver their services in the future.

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Patrick Barnard is Assignment Editor for TMCnet and a columnist covering the telecom industry. To see more of his articles, please visit Patrick Barnard’s columnist page.

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