With a four-way price war going on between AT&T, Verizon,
Sprint and T-Mobile, we have seemed to lost track of VoIP over 3G. Software
from companies such as Fring or Truphone allow you to make VoIP calls on your
iPhone, but only over WiFi. There are hacks (crash-x) that allow you to trick
the iPhone into thinking you're connected to WiFi and make VoIP calls over 3G
(or downspeed to EDGE/GPRS). I'm still wondering ... why bother? If the idea was
to save minutes or money, the carriers have already responded by driving cheap
voice with price reductions. Besides, VoIP over 3G needs massive data compression
and low latency to battle quality of service issues that make the user experience
poor.Skype claims they only need
a small amount of bandwidth - between 6 kbps and 40 kbps, but I don't think
they can overcome latency issues. Many users were disappointed Skype 1.3 did
not include push notifications or support VoIP over 3G. They still have
usability issues using Skype when "real" phone calls come in (it logs you off). Eventually data
plans will race for the bottom too so Skype could become irrelevant on 3G/4G
handsets.
Paul Lopez is a 20+ year technology veteran whose career has spanned multiple disciplines such as product management, software development, engineering, marketing, business development and operations... read more
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