Yesterday I told under the headline „Why mobile and landline phone calls will soon be free“ my outlook on the future of telecommunications. I am sure that per minute charges for landline and mobile phone calls will soon be a thing of the past. Even a 29 dollar monthly flatrate for all calls will seem too expensive. But not because the companies change their business models. It's the clients who find ways to circumvent the paid networks. They leverage their phone costs by using the SIP standard which can be seen as a Pandora's box to the industry.
Today I want to show you some other examples how I would do it. I'll also try to explain how the companies try to avoid these tricks. Skype and Truphone for instance try to stay out of the rat race by avoiding to implement the whole functionality of the SIP standard. Skype more than Truphone, obviously. Rebtel tries to tie up their clients to pay 1 Dollar a week for their incoming numbers. Jajah wants you to deposit at least 5 dollars on your account to charge you for their callback service. But they all can be beaten.
Connect Skype to a normal phone:
Skype relies on its own closed communication standard and until now there were no easy ways to use Skype on your normal phone. But maybe these days are over.
The VoSKY Exchange from abpTECH alleges to be the world's first product to seamlessly bridge an existing PBX to the Skype network. It adds four Skype lines to your PBX, and extends the benefit of Skype to every extension in your office.
At CeBIT the Italian company PCService presented in march their Linux software Skip2PBX, which serves as an addition to a company's existing PBX. Installed on a Linux machine, which can also be virtual, it controls up to 30 Skype accounts at one time, using different sessions of the Skype program. When a Skype call arrives it's being redirected to a phone. The Users can call their Skype contacts for free by using short numbers on their phone.
But the easiest way is certainly to use Fring on a mobile phone. Why hassle with the PBX when there is a phone software that communicates with all kind of messengers and SIP phone networks? Fring works on Wifi and 3G.
Get a cheap incoming phone number for Truphone:
Truphone has another interesting way to assure their income. They give free calls to 40 countries worldwide until end of June, but maybe this special offer will last forever. It's not only a marketing gag, they just have another source of income. The Truphone numbers in the UK are mobile phone numbers. To call them is quite pricey and Truphone takes its share from the incoming calls, as a Truphone network engineer affirms.
But there is an easy way to avoid these costs:
Install Sipgate as a second SIP provider in your mobile phone. So people can call you on your free Sipgate landline number. You can even set up a call forward from the Sipgate number. Just install Sipgate on Voxalot and make a call forward to your Truphone SIP address which has the form 447624XXXXXX@truphone.com. Your friends can call you always on your Sipgate number, but poor Truphone (which you will probably use for the free outbound calls) will not earn on the inbound leg from PSTN anymore.
Truphone always tried to prevent this kind of tweaking by not showing to their costumers their own SIP password. Truphone's software leaves it encrypted on the Nokia mobile phone to prevent that people use the service on other devices, circumventing the Truphone network. So do the Sipgate workaround! Calls between Sipgate and their partner networks are free, that's understood.
Get lots of inbound numbers like at Rebtel:
One business of Rebtel is to give you local incoming phone numbers in many countries and charge a dollar a week for that. But why should you pay when there are free incoming numbers? I, for instance, have dozens of SIP accounts with their respective inbound numbers from different countries concentrated at Voxalot. No matter which number you call, they all ring on the same phone. The thing gets even more funny because my Voxalot account works with Sipbroker and Tpad. They have inbound number in nearly every country of the world. You can call them at a local rate, dial the account number and my phone will ring.
Free Jajah like web callback:
Voxalot even has a Jajah like web callback. But other than Jajah these calls can cost you nothing if you use free VoIP providers on both legs of the call. There is also a version for cell phones at mobile.voxalot.com which costs nearly nothing for the mobile data. Enjoy your free calls!
Of course the described services also work on mobile phones outside Wifi, using an IP PBX with GSM SIM cards as 4S newcom offers.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Monday, April 16, 2007
Why mobile and landline phone calls will soon be free
Thomas Anglero is one of the big VoIP experts. He was a senior executive adviser with Telenor AS, CEO of Free World Dialup, VP of Vocaltec Communications and CEO of TrulyGlobal. So we might expect from him only a positive view on the the VoIP industry. Also because he is still attached to it as CEO of Nuclei Networks, a VoIP service provider in emerging Balkan markets.
But his latest blog entry sounds more than depressed to me. Under the emblematic title „VoIP's tragedy was foretold by Hamlet“ he writes:
I suppose this actual development is just the way it goes and we are on the verge of a big paradigm shift. Phone calls aren't meant to cost anymore. They will be free. Like emails disappeared the written letter and the payment for the postage stamp. I would love to see it and already realize it on a smaller scale, by convincing my friends to use VoIP so that we can make free on net calls.
And there is more to come: If you use the SIP standard cleverly every phone call can be free, even mobile calls. One way to achieve this is the fwdOUT™ Phone Sharing Network.
Other companies, like 4S newcom, are working on the mobile edge. For costumers they can equip their IP PBX with SIM cards of all German mobile phone providers. Of course with flat rate tariffs, so you can ring the PBX and it calls you back for free. Once connected you can, theoretically, use the fwdOUT™ service or every other VoIP provider which connects you to the world for free. For instance Voipstunt, which offers free calls to 40 countries and the rest of its destinations very cheap. Voipstunt is one of the many brands of the German company Betamax. Their prices are so cheap that people from all over the world use them. I recently read comments in a forum by a Brazilian who does all his local calls with Lowratevoip, another Betamax company. Having compared lots of VoIP providers in the last time I suppose that they are a real menace to the industry, undercutting nearly every other offer.
So what will this all lead to?
I would no be surprised to see some kind of „war“ start very soon. It's the big incumbents and the mobile operators against the thousands of small VoIP companies. First signs are how Vonage gets pushed out of business with a lawsuit by Verizon and the crippled Nokia N95 which Vodafone and Orange sell to their costumers in the UK. People where quite surprised to see that they cannot use VoIP on their branded N95, which normally can.
But to me this mutilation seems quite reasoned. From april 2007 the City of London will become the biggest wireless Internet hotspot in Europe. This means that in Europe's most important finance and economy center the people can call for free or very cheap by using VoIP on their cell phones, circumventing the traditional mobile networks.
The big winners will be SIP phone companies like Truphone or Sipgate. Where there is bandwith there you can make calls. It seems that the standardization of VoIP in SIP has opened a Pandora's box for all telecommunication companies: With SIP you can tie every phone system together, as you see in fwdOUT™ and 4S newcom's IP PBX. More and more bridges are being built to make free phone calls. The people like it and companies can soon only charge modest prices for the bandwith. Voice will become "just another application", as techies use to say. Or, as a comment on Gigaom states:
(Read my next blog posts „More tricks for free phone calls“and „Tpad to involuntarily offer free phone calls worldwide?“ to learn more.)
But his latest blog entry sounds more than depressed to me. Under the emblematic title „VoIP's tragedy was foretold by Hamlet“ he writes:
VoIP is a 1/3 of penny numbers game with margins so low that micro-credits used in Malaysia by mobile operators have higher margins then VoIP. Think about this...Sad words. But only from a company's standpoint. The clients might think differently.
At Fall VON last year, the head of Yahoos! VoIP service told a story about how the head of accounting called him into a meeting to question his reasons for continuing its VoIP business. She informed him that the average margins for Yahoos! services are around 80% and his VoIP business was almost impossible to calculate...she asked, "why are we in 'this' business?"
I suppose this actual development is just the way it goes and we are on the verge of a big paradigm shift. Phone calls aren't meant to cost anymore. They will be free. Like emails disappeared the written letter and the payment for the postage stamp. I would love to see it and already realize it on a smaller scale, by convincing my friends to use VoIP so that we can make free on net calls.
And there is more to come: If you use the SIP standard cleverly every phone call can be free, even mobile calls. One way to achieve this is the fwdOUT™ Phone Sharing Network.
The fwdOUT™ Network is a system that matches callers with other users that can complete the call for them at no charge. The only catch is that to make some calls, you have to let others use your phone. fwdOUT™is free and not to be used for commercial purposes.Critcs said that fwdOUT™ doesn't work good. There are too many dead routes, because only few people know it. But the idea is brilliant and with a little grassroots marketing it can become bigger. I think that it's no big problem that you need an Asterisk server to become a member of this free call fraternity. Asterisk is every time easier to install and there are pre-configurated packages. Also you don't need a full fledged personal computer anymore to run it. Asterisk can run on small, fanless, quiet industrial PCs that spend few energy. There was even a competition to install it on an Apple TV. Another way is install Asterisk on your web server, which you can get für 3 Dollars a month. But the most elegant way seems to me to use the web based Asterisk PBX that you can get for free at PBXes.com.
For Instance, Erik lives in New York City, and he gets free local phone service, his family is in Holland. Joe is an expatriate from New York living in Holland that calls New York on a regular basis. Using the Free World Dialup Phone Sharing Service, Erik shares his number. Joe also shares his number. When Joe calls New York, he uses Erik’s line and Erik uses Joe’s Line. The sharing is not done on a one-on-one basis, members share with the entire community and accumulate credits when their line is used. These credits can be used to place calls through other member’s phones. Free World Dialup maintains the tallies so that no line is used more than the owner has permitted.
Other companies, like 4S newcom, are working on the mobile edge. For costumers they can equip their IP PBX with SIM cards of all German mobile phone providers. Of course with flat rate tariffs, so you can ring the PBX and it calls you back for free. Once connected you can, theoretically, use the fwdOUT™ service or every other VoIP provider which connects you to the world for free. For instance Voipstunt, which offers free calls to 40 countries and the rest of its destinations very cheap. Voipstunt is one of the many brands of the German company Betamax. Their prices are so cheap that people from all over the world use them. I recently read comments in a forum by a Brazilian who does all his local calls with Lowratevoip, another Betamax company. Having compared lots of VoIP providers in the last time I suppose that they are a real menace to the industry, undercutting nearly every other offer.
So what will this all lead to?
I would no be surprised to see some kind of „war“ start very soon. It's the big incumbents and the mobile operators against the thousands of small VoIP companies. First signs are how Vonage gets pushed out of business with a lawsuit by Verizon and the crippled Nokia N95 which Vodafone and Orange sell to their costumers in the UK. People where quite surprised to see that they cannot use VoIP on their branded N95, which normally can.
But to me this mutilation seems quite reasoned. From april 2007 the City of London will become the biggest wireless Internet hotspot in Europe. This means that in Europe's most important finance and economy center the people can call for free or very cheap by using VoIP on their cell phones, circumventing the traditional mobile networks.
The big winners will be SIP phone companies like Truphone or Sipgate. Where there is bandwith there you can make calls. It seems that the standardization of VoIP in SIP has opened a Pandora's box for all telecommunication companies: With SIP you can tie every phone system together, as you see in fwdOUT™ and 4S newcom's IP PBX. More and more bridges are being built to make free phone calls. The people like it and companies can soon only charge modest prices for the bandwith. Voice will become "just another application", as techies use to say. Or, as a comment on Gigaom states:
It’s becoming a tired catchphrase, but it’s no less true for its’ repetition: All voice is converging towards free. It’s just another service on your dumb pipe: It makes no more sense to pay a per-voice call charge than it does a per-website visit or a per-email fee. I don’t regard myself as a bleeding edge adopter, but these days about 85% of my calling is on-net (Either Skype or one of the zillion SIP networks that operate here in Oz). It’s a bit cumbersome (Prefix dialling for the SIP network, then the users’ own 86 digit SIP phone number), but I’m viewing that as a temporary aberration.Paying a phone bill is so 80ies style!
I’d say the days of PSTN arbitrage (which is really what the VOIP providers are) are coming to an end. I’m cheering FON and others on too, so that soon enough the days of GSM arbitrage will be over too.
LG
(Read my next blog posts „More tricks for free phone calls“and „Tpad to involuntarily offer free phone calls worldwide?“ to learn more.)
Friday, April 13, 2007
Crippling the Nokia N95 might be the right move
The Truphone blog tells that some UK clients of the company reported a strange behaviour of their brand new Nokia N95. The devices they've bought under contract from their carriers appear to have internet telephony disabled. This means they cannot use Truphone as they'd hoped.
Too bad, but understandable as VoIP experts Jeff Pulver and Andy Abramson comment. Especially Jeff puts himself very much in the shoes of the mobile carriers:
I just love to use Wifi telephony on my new Nokia E61. I use three different SIP telephony providers at the same time. Two of them ring on my mobile phone and my desk phone at the same time when a call enters. Only Truphone doesn’t do this because it works only on mobile phones.
It’s really easy to enter the data for the SIP connection into the E61. In fact I use about 20 different SIP providers on my mobile phone: Pulver, Gizmo, Iptel.org, Ekiga.net and the like are all tied to my Voxalot account. I wrote about this before.
I even tried VoIP on GPRS because I have really cheap data prices. It works, only the delay is horrible. But if my carrier provided 3G I would surely use it for VoIP. With HSDPA and VoIP the sound would be crystal clear. Look at cities like London! They will have spotless Wifi coverage soon. No need for using the mobile carrier anymore. Instead my prefered no frills VoiP operator gives me unlimited calls to 40 countries for the price of about 4 dollars a month. This includes my own country, what's of course the most important.
"Free calls" like in "free beer" are the VoIP killer app to me. When I see my low costs for calls from my mobile and my desk phone I understand the suffering of the incumbents and the mobile carriers.
But maybe that's just the payback for the former years' rip off.
Too bad, but understandable as VoIP experts Jeff Pulver and Andy Abramson comment. Especially Jeff puts himself very much in the shoes of the mobile carriers:
Given the reality of how much money Nokia makes on an annual basis from companies like Orange UK and Vodaphone UK, if I worked at Nokia and had the sales responsibility for say the Vodaphone account, I would do whatever my customer asked of me to keep and protect their business.It's strange to see how the VoIP community criticizes and approves the crippling of the N95 at the same. I feel so schizophrenic too. As a hard core VoIP user I refuse to block VoIP on mobile phones. But as a rational person I understand that the mobile carriers have to be afraid of it. I am the best example.
I just love to use Wifi telephony on my new Nokia E61. I use three different SIP telephony providers at the same time. Two of them ring on my mobile phone and my desk phone at the same time when a call enters. Only Truphone doesn’t do this because it works only on mobile phones.
It’s really easy to enter the data for the SIP connection into the E61. In fact I use about 20 different SIP providers on my mobile phone: Pulver, Gizmo, Iptel.org, Ekiga.net and the like are all tied to my Voxalot account. I wrote about this before.
Markus Göbel's Tech News Comments:You can dial 20 different numbers or SIP addresses and they all ring on my mobile phone. Great!
Why I use about 20 different VoIP providers
I even tried VoIP on GPRS because I have really cheap data prices. It works, only the delay is horrible. But if my carrier provided 3G I would surely use it for VoIP. With HSDPA and VoIP the sound would be crystal clear. Look at cities like London! They will have spotless Wifi coverage soon. No need for using the mobile carrier anymore. Instead my prefered no frills VoiP operator gives me unlimited calls to 40 countries for the price of about 4 dollars a month. This includes my own country, what's of course the most important.
"Free calls" like in "free beer" are the VoIP killer app to me. When I see my low costs for calls from my mobile and my desk phone I understand the suffering of the incumbents and the mobile carriers.
But maybe that's just the payback for the former years' rip off.
Friday, April 6, 2007
Jajah misleads the media with news on iPhone, LG Prada and Sony PSP
Does anybody understand the public relations officer at Jajah? Every few days the company makes a similar announcement that on closer examination means nothing:
It seems they try to to make a news out of every device that can open their mini website mobile.jajah.com. Maybe they have the laziest press department ever, that only wants to vary the same press release again and again? Or are their Venture Capitalists pushing too hard for good news, so that they try to cheat them with these hot air press releases?
I am already waiting for news like Jajah works with Nokia N95, Jajah ready for Motorola MOTORIZR Z8, Finally Jajah on Samsung F700, Jajah also works with Sagem my150X, Call your friends with Jajah on the Samsung SGH-i600, ...
This way they could have every day a new announcement. But what upsets me most is that there are still blogs and news websites which present these lame press releases as a big story.
Read this quote from Jajah:
Are you getting it? Jajah is doing nothing for the iPhone, the LG Prada or the Playstation Portable (PSP). They design no extra software and have no exclusive contracts to preinstall Jajah on these devices. At least they don't say so in their press releases. The company is just announcing that their mobile website can be opened on these devices.
That's like if I would announce that the website of Markus Göbel's Tech News Comments is compatible with the iPhone, LG Prada or the Sony PSP. Of course it is. It's a website, stupid! Every device with a browser can open it. mobile.jajah.com is nothing else, but I wouldn't write a press release for every gear that can show my blog.
But nevertheless GigaOM says "Jajah uses devices to grow" or the Tech Digest applauds "Quite a coup for VoIP company Jajah, it has managed to get its functionality featured on LG's much-anticipated Prada handset".
Can't they read? Or am I missing something?
PSP (PlayStation Portable) gamers around the globe: Call with JAJAH!
Thursday, April 05. 2007
JAJAH Wears Prada
Thursday, March 29. 2007
Apple iPhone + Jajah
Tuesday, January 09. 2007
It seems they try to to make a news out of every device that can open their mini website mobile.jajah.com. Maybe they have the laziest press department ever, that only wants to vary the same press release again and again? Or are their Venture Capitalists pushing too hard for good news, so that they try to cheat them with these hot air press releases?
I am already waiting for news like Jajah works with Nokia N95, Jajah ready for Motorola MOTORIZR Z8, Finally Jajah on Samsung F700, Jajah also works with Sagem my150X, Call your friends with Jajah on the Samsung SGH-i600, ...
This way they could have every day a new announcement. But what upsets me most is that there are still blogs and news websites which present these lame press releases as a big story.
Read this quote from Jajah:
Nearly 25 million PSP systems have shipped globally, so millions can take part in free or low-cost calls by using the Internet browser functionality and visiting mobile.jajah.com to make a JAJAH call.Or this:
Jajah will work on the Prada, the same way it will work on the Apple iPhone. To use JAJAH, you simply go to mobile.jajah.com via the phones browser.Or this:
We are going to bring Jajah Mobile to the iPhone as soon as it becomes available. iPhone users will be able to make free or very low cost global Jajah calls with a single click, without a special download, other equipment, wi-fi or broadband access.
Are you getting it? Jajah is doing nothing for the iPhone, the LG Prada or the Playstation Portable (PSP). They design no extra software and have no exclusive contracts to preinstall Jajah on these devices. At least they don't say so in their press releases. The company is just announcing that their mobile website can be opened on these devices.
That's like if I would announce that the website of Markus Göbel's Tech News Comments is compatible with the iPhone, LG Prada or the Sony PSP. Of course it is. It's a website, stupid! Every device with a browser can open it. mobile.jajah.com is nothing else, but I wouldn't write a press release for every gear that can show my blog.
But nevertheless GigaOM says "Jajah uses devices to grow" or the Tech Digest applauds "Quite a coup for VoIP company Jajah, it has managed to get its functionality featured on LG's much-anticipated Prada handset".
Can't they read? Or am I missing something?
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