Mobile Voice over IP is Taking Shape

”Mobile voice over IP to me today is going to our New York office and

logging into my IP phone there and it appears as if I’m in my Minneapolis

office. This is base-level mobility,” says Chris Ferski, director of

Information Technology at Goldsmith Agio Helms, an investment banking

firm in Minneapolis.

”True seamless mobility will let me go anywhere and do what I need to do

and not have to worry about phone numbers and contact information — it

will all be invisible and transferable,” he says.

Ferski himself says he has different levels of mobile voice over IP that

he’s working through. The first is simply being able to have the

company’s 110 employees easily move between the five corporate offices in

Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and New York without having to

deal with moves, adds and changes. He gets this functionality from his

Nortel Networks VoIP network.

He also uses Nortel’s softphone tools to let his users access the VoIP

network from the road using their laptops and headsets.

Next year, he plans to add to this mobility by installing wireless

LAN-enabled mobile handsets for use in the company’s public spaces.

Ferski says high-end bankers could then log into those handsets, which

would be wirelessly connected to access points, and carry them into the

boardrooms and other meeting areas and not miss important calls about

deals that otherwise might go to their desk phones.

Cell Power

While Ferski is working within the confines of the wireless LAN network

to gain voice over IP functionality, TalkPlus, Inc. is encouraging users

to make more of their cell phones for mobile VoIP capabilities.

”Mobile VoIP to me is having a device that lets you drive down the

highway at 60 miles an hour and get all the features that you’d have on a

voice over IP connection,” says Jeff Black, CEO of TalkPlus in Menlo

Park, Calif.

The features TalkPlus enable include multiple numbers or identities to

one phone, voice mail for each of those identities, group conference

calling, and low-call rates. ”You can have one number or 10 numbers and

each of them have individual controls,” he says.

”You’re in the cellular world all the time. You want to extract the

cost-savings of the voice over IP in the broadband world into cellular

service,” he says. Black claims his service offers rates as low as two

cents a minute for calls in the U.S., and three and a half cents a minute

overseas to cities like London.

He adds that the company is able to achieve this by running voice on the

voice channel and data and other information over the signaling channel

on carrier networks. TalkPlus co-locates its equipment in neutral

facilities, like Equinix, so it can plug directly into carrier switches.

TalkPlus is currently a beta-version hosted service, where consumers can

go to the company’s Web site, www.talkplus.com, create an account with

multiple identities and have the application sent to their phone via an

SMS message. Black says more features, such as links to LDAP directories

and an enterprise version, will be added early next year.

Future speak

Though these innovations are impressive, Randy Giusto, group vice

president of Mobility, Computing and Consumer Markets for International

Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass., says the real holy grail for mobile VoIP

is the convergence of voice over Wi-Fi and cellular networks. He says

that’s where companies will truly see a cost-savings.

”There are a growing number of employees making cell phone calls on

campus,” Giusto says. If they could access a wireless IP network from

their handsets, the savings could be in the range of 25 percent to 28

percent.

”The grand vision is that you’re on a call and in the building you’re on

the Wi-Fi network, and then you walk out to the parking lot and you

automatically switch over to the cellular network. But there isn’t a

clear software-based handoff that’s transparent to the user yet,” he

says.

But there has been a ”chicken and egg” mentality about creating new

handsets, services and infrastructure. ”IT organizations are saying if I

can save that much for voice calls, I’d be willing to do it. But the

handset companies are waiting for orders and interest,” Giusto says.

This is a problem that Sanjay Jhawar, vice president of Marketing and

Development at BridgePort Networks, Inc., is trying to solve. Jhawar is

chairman of the steering committee for MobileIgnite, an organization

formed in January to create open solutions for the merging of mobile

voice over IP on Wi-Fi and cellular networks.

”Our goal is for users to be able to have a single phone that would be a

mobile phone when you were in the wide area network outside the home and

office environment and also a voice over IP phone with Internet calling

when you’re near a Wi-Fi network. And you’d have the same number across

both networks,” he says.

For this to happen, Jhawar says there has to be a convergence at the

device and service layers. ”There are elements that have to be looked at

in the mobile network, fixed networks, media gateways, and

softswitches,” he says.

Though it seems too complex for there to be progress, more than 20

companies, including VeriSign, Inc., Net2Phone, Inc., Kyocera Wireless

Corp., and Boingo Wireless, Inc., have joined the organization.

Jhawar says their charter is threefold: to create interoperability

between handsets with Wi-Fi and cellular; to create IP Centrex to mobile

network interoperability; and to create interoperability between SIP and

mobile environments.

For Ferski, this sounds like a dream come true.

”I’m looking forward to devices coming out to support this. The more

options we have to connect seamlessly and to seamlessly hop onto various

networks, the better,” he says.