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Mobile Voice over IP is Taking Shape

IT managers who are putting mobile voice over IP on their enterprise wish lists this holiday season might want to be more specific. The term ”mobile VoIP” has taken on a multitude of meanings with very different technology requirements. ”In its most straightforward, mobile VoIP is voice over IP over cellular and Wi-Fi networks, but […]

Written By
Sandra Gittlen
Sandra Gittlen
Published: Dec 12, 2005
Updated: Jan 28, 2021
6 minute read
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IT managers who are putting mobile voice over IP on their enterprise wish

lists this holiday season might want to be more specific. The term

”mobile VoIP” has taken on a multitude of meanings with very different

technology requirements.

”In its most straightforward, mobile VoIP is voice over IP over cellular

and Wi-Fi networks, but that’s still three to four years away. When

people talk about mobile VoIP today, they’re referring to voice over

wireless LANs,” says Svetlana Issaeva, manager of Communications, Media

and Technology Research at Pyramid Research in London.

There are currently three variations of mobile voice over IP being

researched or already in production in consumer and enterprise markets:

  • Mobile voice over IP over wireless LANs;
  • Mobile voice over IP over cellular networks, and
  • Mobile voice over IP over cellular and Wi-Fi networks.
    ”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.  SEE ALL
    ARTICLES      
Sandra Gittlen
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