VoIP goes mobile: A new challenge for Skype, Vonage and others?
At last VoIP is beginning to free itself from the shackles of broadband and PC and has come in the hands of cellphone users.
It is an obvious threat to Voice 2.0 , and of course to old-fashioned telephone and mobile companies. The companies like Skype, who have reportedly not moved much ahead in the mobile zone, also have to adapt to this new technology. These companies in the recent years have attracted millions of customers by allowing cheap or free phone calls over broadband instead of traditional phone lines.
However to use them users must buy special hardware to make phone calls over the internet, and the best deals are typically between two callers who use the same service. In other words, Skype isn’t much helpful in connecting you to your old grandmother in the old country unless she’s savvy enough to have a broadband connection and an account of her own.
Now is the era of smaller companies like Jajah and Rebtel. One company is boasting that customers can make VOIP calls over landlines or mobile phones without needing broadband. For $1 a week, another company connects international callers on mobile phones at no charge other than that for a local call.
In both cases, the companies rely on the fact that incoming calls are often free for cell-phone users. Both approaches have weak points, like a complicated pricing system (Jajah) and a clunky calling protocol (Rebtel). And there’s new competition from iSkoot, which offers software that helps cell phones access VOIP.