News

Mobile VoIP

03/07/2009
Has the time come?



The massive surge in mobile data usage enabled by broader 3G network availability, higher download speeds and better adapted smartphones such as the iPhone has been a source of hope in an otherwise quickly saturating mobile industry in advanced European and North American markets. This momentum has led to a number of popular Internet applications (search engines, instant messengers, games…) being transposed for mobile access and use, few of which have generated more anticipation, fear and outright hype than voice over IP (VoIP).

This paper (free download on your right) explores the burning question of whether the time for a mobile VoIP “tipping point” has come. We feel that mobile VoIP is not ready for primetime yet for several reasons:

1. Mobile and fixed VOIP are fake twins
While there are interesting lessons to derive from what happened in fixed VoIP in terms of market acceptance factors (simple and universal end user experience, acceptable quality of service, attractive pricing), fixed and mobile networks have intrinsically different technical attributes. Consequently, the bandwidth and capacity constrained mobile environment creates substantial implementation challenges for the large scale adoption of a bandwidth, latency and quality of service-sensitive application such as mobile VoIP.

2. Mobile VoIP is still in its infancy with highly limited use cases
Current mobile VoIP solutions have severe limitations for end users in terms of usability and availability as they only operate in semi-nomadic use in 3G or Wifi coverage areas while not ensuring 3G to 2G or 3G to Wifi handover or proper carrier to carrier handover. They also induce significant handset battery drains while not being easily operable across most handsets.

3. Current mobile VoIP on 3G has many of the “solution looking for a problem” attributes
Packet data channels of 3G were initially designed to enable a “best effort” transport of data services alongside a robust and time tested (derived from GSM) circuit switched design for voice services. Introducing mobile VoIP in the resource constrained mobile environment (i) creates technical and quality of service challenges that traditional mobile voice was designed to avoid, (ii) disrupts the complex service provisioning tradeoffs that operators need to achieve for a mass market high quality service (iii) while, for the time being, neither generating clear usage benefits for the majority of users nor for mobile operators.

4. Mobile VoIP should become a widespread service through the combination of optimized managed VoIP solutions, pervasive HSPA and better yet LTE networks
The long term dynamic towards unified voice and electronic (email, instant messaging, social networks…) communications integrated with presence and location features are creating compelling long term benefits for users and operators alike. These will be enabled by the emergence of managed VoIP solutions which by prioritizing packetized voice can (i) address the limitations of current mobile VoIP, (ii) optimize network resource utilization to enable the development of other mobile data services and (iii) capitalize on widespread availability of higher bandwidth mobile access.