TeliaSonera to charge for all voice calls over IP?

Seems like TeliaSonera has some ambitious plans.

According to Finnish source, their CEO has stated that "data takes 80% of the capacity in the TeliaSonera networks, but 80% of their revenues comes from voice services."
And hence TeliaSonera targets being the first operator to charge for all VoIP calls.
They will offer their customers a fixed plan which includes VoIP calling, this to be launched in Spain first.

The Spanish offering sounds like VoLTE calling and terminated internationally. This is not unheard of, just look at what MetroPCS has been doing in the USA.

Gotta wish them luck if TeliaSonera wants to stop OTT providers.
It comes to the question of will QoS and bit differentation be enough.
And how about services like integrating voice to web sites? We are unlikely to talk of MSISDN numbers then...

Cisco goes altruistic...

Cisco raises the compatibility concerns to European Commission, in the Skype-MS merger.

Imagine how difficult it would be if you were limited to calling people who only use the same carrier or if your phone could only call certain brands and not others. Cisco wants to avoid this future for video communications, and therefore today appealed the European Commission’s approval of the Microsoft/Skype merger to the General Court of the European Union. Messagenet, a European VoIP service provider, has joined us in the appeal.

This raises a couple of thoughts:
- compatibility is more crucial in the lower layers of the network. How about router vendors defining compatible OSSs?
- let's remember when Apple iPhone came out, Cisco took Apple to court because of the name. One could ask if that was for real.
This time there could be real concerns behind this. Cisco has been looking for video to be a key application. Of course, the more traffic, the better for their infrastructure sales
- at least I have not heard of their court-case partner Messagenet earlier, need to check their background...
- of course Cisco concerns as such are valid. MS may have a lot cooking here...

VoLTE-3G handover: is there a case?

Qualcomm and Ericsson are making hand-offs.

Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq: QCOM) and Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) announced Thursday they have completed the first voice call handed off from a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network, on voice-over LTE, to a WCDMA 3G network using Single Radio Voice Call Continuity (SRVCC).

SRVCC is required by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for a seamless hand-off when a VoLTE call leaves the LTE network coverage area. Qualcomm completed its first -- and, it claims, the world's first -- hand-off on Dec. 23, on an Ericsson network using a handset with the Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 3G/LTE multimode processor on board.

There are a couple of reasons why I fail to see the value of this.
Firstly, this is more of the same, nothing new.
There will be no new services because of this concept.

Secondly, handover requirement of this type is something defined by Homo Telecomus (aka "BellHead").
I have not seen any major need for a WLAN/cellular handover, so why for this?

But future evolution COULD be more interesting.
Will RCS be implemented by Qualcomm?
I don't think RCS will be a success, but certainly a well-defined slow-moving standard could be beneficial as a chipmaker could jump into the game.
Let's also note that Qualcomm has been recruiting IMS know-how.

Let's see if this will increase demand for IMS.
Some sources say that CSFB is fast enough.
But, the fact that Qualcomm has made this happen, means there will be mobile endpoints to support VoLTE.

Also, where will the SIP stack reside:
- in the chipset (yes,if you ask Q...but will it be only for voice then?)
- in the OS (does MS have an interest here?)
- in the application layer (maybe OTT players wish that...)

In the original story, there was also an interesting comment:

My question is when might we see a "hand-off" from data billing to voice minutes billing? Will VoLTE conversations be billed as "voice" minutes even though they are data streams?

Guessing that the telcos aren't going to want to "hand off" the lucrative voice minutes, even when they are just another data stream. Long live the clarity of wireless billing.

The Microsoft opportunity with Lync

Microsoft Lync is spreading in corporate market like wildfire.
Not only that, but MS is riding the wave of Lync-to-Lync federation.

It is interesting to note the emergence of tools to e.g. set check the federation capability of an Outlook contact.
But let's remember, that while reducing costs is always a target, I would argue Lync-to-Lync federation is not a prime decision making criteria in choosing a supplier, quite yet.
Business responsible managers together with sourcing will choose the suppliers, not IT departments.
Having said that, features beyond basic voice like document sharing may be more important.

Voice messaging: where did it go?

Received an interesting question from a reader. Firstly, big thanks. It is a great pleasure to get feedback of any kind.

Here goes:

There are a lot topic regarding CoIP or VoIP. What about short voice messaging over IP?
Its concept is similar to Push-To-Talk. It can be a replacement to part of SMS.

I see there are some benefits of short voice messaging comparing to SMS:

- Fast to compose. There is a trend to use speech-to-text feature in the phone to compose SMS but still the user needs to correct the typo manually.

- Voice messaging through 3rd party instant messaging server over IP may have no extra cost. But I don’t know whether there is such a server.

- More information in the voice messages than the plain short messages: the sender’s mood and voice tune. The pure text message can’t contain such rich information.



Short voice messaging refers to the use case that the sender records a short audio clip and sends it to the recipient and the recipient plays the audio clip.


I would say yes. In the various push-to-talk solutions that were trying to enter markets in around 2004-6, I remember the company Fastmobile whose solution was this type of a voice message oriented approach.
There are plenty of others, I guess too. Let's not forget about MMS too, in the MMS paradigm.
The interesting question is why this is not more common? There are a couple of reasons maybe. Firsly, the usual non-interop between IM clouds. This is gradually changing of course, but having this type of application-to-application interop and very close integration could take more time to happen between the clouds.
If I were Apple, looking to really differentiate inside my own cloud, I would explore this type of concept.
There is great user delight to be created here.
Need to check imessage features...

WebRTC progressing

Seems Google is making WebRTC progress fast.
Now it is available in Chrome for development purposes. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

But all this is just natural, this is a natural for Google.
More interesting will be how MS/Skype play this game...

Skype to integrate with Lync?

Skype VP Osterloh talks here of various ways Skype plans to integrate with MS products.

It is kinda interesting to think of Skype client integrating with Facebook, this has been available for some time. Would be keen to see the roadmap for that client, my bet is that XMPP has a role there.

Integration with Lync? Well this could mean several things.
I guess here they talk of gateways and XMPP comes in as a natural there too.
But for business reasons (and maybe internal, who knows...) again, my speculation is that Lync and Skype will remain separate...