Source: www.voip-news.com
Is mobile voice traffic going to transition to mobile VoIP? According to a recent prediction, 50 percent of it will be mobile VoIP by 2019. Read about it on VoIP & Gadgets Blog.
Fring has secured an additional $10 million in funding. Read about it on VoIP News of the UK.
SIP to Skype calling? VoIP Watch says it’s just a matter of when.
Source: www.voip-news.com
If rumors are to be believed, Skype will be introducing a VoIP app for the iPhone soon, according to The VoIP Weblog.
Fring now has a Twitter 2.0 add-on. Read about it on VoIP News of the UK.
Skype has yet to get into Canada and Germany … poor, poor Skype. Read about the troubled waters on VoIP Watch.
Source: www.voip-news.com
Fring has been awarded Windows Mobile Certification. Read about it on VoIP News of the UK.
Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch has some dish about Truphone from Macworld.
Smith on VoIP is doing something impressive: trying to help people who’ve been laid off in the VoIP sector find work by creating a Peter Shankman/Help a Reporter-esk list. So check it out and opt-in if you are job hunting.
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Source: www.voip-news.com
If you use an iPhone and are interested in what mobile VoIP can offer, then you probably have heard of Fring. Fring is not only one of the few providers that offer a VoIP program for the iPhone, but it’s also a service that can aggragate your content from several IM programs — simplifying your online presence.
But does it work, and does it work well? That’s a good question. Macworld recently reviewed Fring, saying that it struggles as both an instant messaging program and as a VoIP program. It’s not terrible, but it’s not perfect yet either.
According to Macworld:
One issue to consider, though I don’t consider it a negative by any means, is that Fring requires a Wi-Fi connection to make calls. You can’t connect via an over the air signal, be it Edge or 3G, so this isn’t an app that you’ll have good luck with in the field. For use at home or the office, however, it works relatively well. If you don’t have that many minutes in your plan, it might save you some money. If you plan on doing any International traveling, where both voice and data rates on the iPhone are Trump-level expensive, Fring can save you a small fortune in phone bills. And of course, for iPod touch users, it’s a transformational program.
Yet Fring has two major drawbacks when it comes to VoIP, and both are doozies: quality and reliability. Testing calls back-to-back against a desktop version of Skype running on the same Wi-Fi network, I found that call clarity suffered noticeably on the handset. Fring was much more likely to sound digital, with more distortion and “stuttering” due to latency than when I called the same numbers over the same network connection using Skype and a headset.
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Source: www.voip-news.com
SIPVicious links to an interesting paper about VoIP attacks and what happened to some German users.
VoIP News of the UK reports that Fring has joined forces with an Austrian VoIP provider.
It was bound to happen, given the economy. Counterpath and BroadSoft have both cut some of their workforces, VoIP Watch reports.
Source: goebel.net
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Many people were wondering during the last two years how the Israeli mobile VoIP company Fringland Ltd. wants to make any money. Their versatile software works on virtually every platform and supports more than 1.000 mobile handsets. I heard that 200.000 new users sign up every month to Fring, as well as 80 companies which want to become a SIP affiliate. More than 500 SIP companies are already using the Israeli software as an easy to deploy solution for mobile VoIP, by sending a preconfigured Fring to their users’ handsets or telling their customers how to use it. Fring invested heavily in software development and has to channel the other 500 companies’ traffic over its own servers. Every voice connection goes first from the cellphone to Fring’s servers, no matter if it’s on Skype, SIP or Google Talk. Fring could take its share from the other companies’ earnings, but hey do it for free. Also there is no paid version of Fring. All these business ideas are still in the cloud.
So how does Fring want to make money?
The cell phone multi messenger, which also serves perfectly for nearly free VoIP calls over 3G, should soon be sponsored by advertising. At the OSiM World conference in Berlin I saw an unreleased software version with banner ads for McDonald’s in Fring’s chat window. In a former occassion I could already see advertising by Gillette. The Israeli company with $20 million in venture capital seems to finally care now for revenue streams. Although CEO Avi Shechter had told me in February in an interview at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress that the entire year of 2008 would be dedicated exclusively to software development and revenues would be irrelevant. "The McDonald’s banner ads are just a demonstration", said Fring’s cofounder Boaz Zilberman when we met in Berlin. So until now Fring makes no money from advertising but is proving the concept.
One problem is, says Boaz, that mobile advertising is not very common yet. The advertisers still don’t understand it and therefore employ only small budgets. But these small budgets would be eaten up immediately on the millions of daily Fring messages. That’s why the company is going for bigger clients and advertising networks like Doubleclick or others. Context sensitive advertising like at Google Mail is not on the agenda. "We would have to read every chat message", says Boaz. "But we don’t want that because it would hurt our users’ trust." The business model of another Israeli born company seems creepy to him: Pudding Media is even eavesdropping their users’ conversations to deliver targeted advertising at the computer screen during the phone calls.
Fring is now developing from a sole software for messaging and VoIP to an universal contact solution, which even keeps track of your buddies’ location by GPS. The latest version 3.36.6, which you can only download from Fring’s developer website, has already joined the menus for messengers and social networks. The boundaries between these categories are every time more blurry, because for instance Facebook is also an instant messenger now. In future software versions, every person should appear only once in Fring’s contact list. Until now some people appear twofold, threefold or even more times – because they are connected to Skype, MSN, ICQ or other services at the same time. One click at the buddy’s icon will start a chat, no matter which messenger to other person is using, which can always be escalated into a Fring phone call via VoIP.
Source: gigaom.com
Despite Nokia crippling VoIP on its latest N-series handsets, mobile VoIP companies are coming through with updated apps to keep Nokia users yapping away for free. Today fring released its software update for the N96 and N78 that gives users mobile IM and VoIP.
Other providers such as Truphone and Gizmo are expected to follow with their own N-series clients. Before you get too cheerful over the service, it might be worth noting that Om’s most recent post on the topic hinted that mobile VoIP users could be locked into walled gardens by individual services now that Nokia has taken out the native SIP client.
And for the hardcore VoIP users who need to bridge back to the less technically literate, TringMe is offering a worldwide telephone number folks can call that will ring you on your land line, TringMe mobile-VoIP client or GTalk. Connecting to a land line will require actual money (in the form of credits in a TringMe account), but it’s worth checking out.
Source: goebel.net
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Om Malik has asked "Is Nokia Turning Its Back on MobileVoIP?", pinpointing to the fact that the new Nseries devices N78 and N96 lack an own SIP client, while Nokia before embraced mobile VoIP on it’s Nseries and Eseries devices. Charlie Schick of Nokia Conversations says the report of the death of VoIP has been "grossly exaggerated" and people like Phoneboy, Gizmo5’s Michael Robertson or the company Truphone are buying that argumentation, although it has its flaws. Truphone, Gizmo5 and Fring must have realized immediately that they are winning from Nokia’s move. That’s why they are holding back their horses.
Nokia says that it’s no problem that they have removed the native SIP client from their latest handsets, since companies can develop their own VoIP software based on great APIs. But it’s not as easy as Nokia is trying to say: There are hundreds or thousands of companies without an own software for mobile VoIP. They just rely on the SIP standard. In Germany it’s GMX, 1&1, Sipgate and the several Betamax daughters. Together they have millions of customers, I am one of them. These people cannot use VoIP on the new Nokia phones. I have always ten or more VoIP providers installed on my Nokia E61i’s SIP client. This way I can always use the cheapest route and leverage free on net calls.
It would be nasty if had to install ten or more pieces of software for that purpose. It’s already annoying that Truphone requires a special software because they don’t give me my SIP password. That’s a perversion of the idea of standards. If I need a special software for every company’s offer why is there a standard called SIP?
So as a VoIP tinkerer I have to stay with the older Nokia devices, or at most I can change to the E71. But Nokia’s new Symbian release, S60 3.2, is no option for me – as long as it has no own SIP client. It’s obvious why companies like Fring, Truphone, Gizmo5, Vyke and others are applauding the Nokia move. It ties their customer to them and makes it more difficult to use other companies’ offers. With a native SIP client, which allows to be connected to several different SIP services at the same time, I can be promiscuous. Even the most disruptive mobile VoIP companies prefer to lock me in their walled garden, but I don’t want that.
I still believe that pressure from mobile operators has caused this move of Nokia. HSDPA and HSUPA have brought great bandwith to the latest handsets, enough to use it for Voice over 3G. With the right voice codec you can talk about 15 minutes and use only 1 Megabyte of data. Filtering for VoIP packets slows down the mobile data networks and therefore it’s not very common. If you combine that with the right VoIP provider, like Betamax, this means free mobile phone calls to more than 30 countries. Only data prices apply.
Source: gigaom.com
Nokia, the leading handset maker, has been a favorite of ours for two reasons –- it ruthlessly promoted and added Wi-Fi connectivity to its handsets and added VoIP functionality to its devices.
Carriers did not view these technology developments too kindly since it prevented them from extorting exorbitant amounts of cash for costly long distance connections, leading to the rise of mobile-VoIP players such as Truphone, Fring and Gizmo Project.
But now the Finnish giant seems to have developed cold feet, and some of its new handsets, such as the new N78, are not VoIP compatible anymore. Many of these phones are not on the list of Nokia’s VoIP compatible handsets. A reader tipped us off about this apparent change in the latest N-series phones.
…the N78 (and also to affect the forthcoming N96) which is that Nokia has very quietly and seemingly sneakily redacted their built-in VoIP / SIP implementation in all phones that come with Symbian Series 60 3rd generation Feature Pack 2 (otherwise abbreviated as S60 3.2).
I have a N78 lying around so I decided to test it myself. And lo-and-behold none of the VoIP services I am accustomed to using worked. Truphone and Gizmo are two services I typically use and neither of them work.
Ditto for Fring, a VoIP-IM service as well. However, all three worked on the Nokia E71 smart phone. When I asked Nokia if this was true, the company sent me this response, which pretty much admits that is the case, though it didn’t say why.
Nokia Nseries is committed VoIP services as part of its offering. That is why we have included SIP stack and improved the developer VoIP offering in S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 by enhancing the VoIP APIs to improve the call quality, as an example.
A Nokia VoIP client is not included with the Nokia N78 and the Nokia N96 and VoIP solutions based on this particular client such as Gizmo will not work. However, Forum Nokia will cooperate with third-party developers to support them in porting their applications from S60 3.0/3.1 releases to S60 3.2. One example is Fring, whose popular application will be offered via Nokia’s Download! service for the Nokia N96.
Truphone isn’t waiting around for Nokia to do something. A company spokesman told us: “From Truphone’s perspective Nokia has removed the VoIP client from all the N-Series phones for the planned future. We are putting in a replacement client functionality so that existing customers are not orphaned.”
The theory is that Nokia isn’t mucking with E-series devices because they are more enterprise focused. Since VoWLAN is more popular with the corporations, Nokia can’t afford to remove the VoIP functionality. It is one feature that makes the phones more competitive with say Blackberry.
On the consumer front, however, voice-over-WiFi has become a thorn in the side of carriers, as exemplified by actions of carriers such as T-Mobile against VoWiFi-startups such as Truphone. Furthermore, the emergence of 3G has made it easier to route calls over the 3G network.
Funnily enough, the decision to back away from built-in VoIP comes at a time when fixed mobile convergence is finally beginning to gain traction, especially in Europe and Asia. In the U.S., Nokia launched a handset that works with T-Mobile’s Hotspot@Home service.
Nokia has to be taking a lot of heat from carriers over making VoIP easy on its devices. Whichever way you look at it, I think it is a bone-headed move by the company, which should be trying to out-innovate its competitors and be more open in terms of its features.
The decision also brings into question company’s new mantra of being open and open-source friendly. Being open isn’t about releasing some software in open source, but it is about having an open mind. Shutting down a much loved VoIP feature isn’t exactly the right move.
As our reader very aptly wrote:
….does this move by Nokia really appear to be the type of move that is indicative of a culture shift towards open source per the Symbian Foundation? Google is already culturally rooted in open source (its entire infrastructure runs on Linux clusters). I am not so confident about Nokia’s ability to shift to open source…
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Source: www.voip-news.com
VoIP News of the UK has the scoop on the GIPS solution that’s bringing VoIP to the iPhone.
Fring made a parody of the Olympic rings and VoIP Watch is all over it. Is it a trademark infringement?
The Citrix blog has some handy tips on using GoToMeeting – particularly with regards to making adjustments for different phone systems.
Source: www.voip-news.com
As if answering the popular question: what? you have to buy bandwidth too? VoIP Supply has partnered with bandwidth.com to provider users with both. Read about the partnership on The VoIP Weblog.
Fring is now available on JAVA ME and Linux-based phones. Read about it on VoIP News.
Someone had an awesome experience with Truphone. Read about it on VoIP Watch.
Source: voip-tech.blogspot.com
Even if in pre-release version, the popular Fring it’s ready to land on the iPhone, Fring is a instant messaging software dedicated to mobile phones, smartphones, handheld devices and it support protocols like Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo! and AIM, it allow to make VoIP calls via a SIP provider or using the SkypeOut and SkypeIn service.
Fring works perfectly with WiFi networks (if supported by your device) or by using the Internet connection of your device, the rates for calls over landline phone and cell phones vary depending by your VoIP SIP provider or by SkypeOut fee, if you’re using this one.
The download page dedicated to the iPhone show all the necessary instructions to download, install and set up in some easy steps your iPhone with Fring.
However, on the Fring website it’s possibile to choose your cellphone brand and model and download the appropriate version.
