Expensive international call roaming charges, long the bane of overseas travellers, could soon become a thing of the past. Since April, a few thousand pioneering owners of palmtop computers have avoided the additional fees charged by cellphone operators when they travel abroad by making free — or extremely low-cost — calls over the internet.
Owners of palmtops fitted with Wi-Fi — tiny radio antennas allowing high-speed wireless internet access — can now take advantage of a service previously restricted to fixed-line internet calls. Using a technology called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which delivers calls over the internet rather than through the traditional telephone networks, subscribers to Skype’s new Pocket PC service have been making international calls for local call rates.
This is how it works: an overseas traveller uses Skype’s software to dial into the public phone network on a palmtop with a wireless internet connection. The voice data then travels along the regular internet — at no additional cost — until it nears its local destination. If the recipient of the overseas call is also using Skype, the call costs nothing (although the user may pay for the initial wireless connection).
Even in the most expensive circumstances — when the end recipient is a mobile phone — the call is charged at a local rate, as it is routed from the internet to the public telephone network only at the last moment. Prices do vary depending on which country the call terminates in, but they are still a fraction of what they would cost on the regular GSM network.
It works the other way, too. A call to an overseas cellphone is charged at a similar discount, which means you don’t get stung with a big bill for incoming calls when you return home. ”I could be in Japan, you could call my Skype number and you would just be paying as if it were a call to London,” explains Kat James, of Skype. ”From a traveller’s point of view, that’s a huge saving.”
Since Skype launched its palmtop client in April, more than 1,8-million people have downloaded the software worldwide. ”You can completely avoid the expensive mobile roaming fees,” adds James. ”All you need is to get access to the internet using Wi-Fi, which is becoming more and more ubiquitous.”
Pocket Skype is only available on palmtop computers — sometimes referred to as personal digital assistants (PDAs) — such as the HP’s iPaq and O2’s XDA, but the service will soon be extended to cellphones. The Luxembourg-based company recently announced plans to launch its own mobile handset.
In Japan, telecoms giant NTT DoCoMo plans to ship a Wi-Fi-enabled phone later this year, while Nokia unveiled a similar device, the 770 Internet Tablet, at the Linux World trade show in May. The 770 cannot be used as a phone, however. But there are many more waiting down the line. Vonage, a leading rival of Skype, already sells the F1000 mobile handset in the US and Europe.
John Irving, a Bitish telecommunications consultant, first used Pocket Skype while visiting a trade show in Stockholm in April. ”I was there for a week and during the show there was a wireless local area network (WLan) provided free. My mobile phone bill is usually about £35 (R420) per month and I rarely go over the 800 minutes I get for that. But my bill for that week — just from incoming calls — was about £80 (R960). But my outgoing calls were charged about 1p per minute because I was using Skype over the WLan.”
Mobile operators think it is too early to start fretting about the savings the likes of John Irving are making (and he could have saved even more if he had accepted his incoming calls through Skype).
PocketSkype users represent a tiny percentage of the 59-million mobile subscribers in the UK and few places have the sort of wireless internet bandwidth needed to make PocketSkype a truly convenient service. But this could be just a matter of time.
A number of UK cities are already experimenting with wide area wireless networks. Brighton, Portsmouth and Lewisham in south London offer city-wide wireless networks perfect for making cheap mobile calls. In the US, eight of the 10 biggest cities are building city-wide wireless networks, while smaller wireless public access points continue to proliferate as quickly as new services appear on regular GSM phones.
And Skype isn’t restricted to international callers. Although there is less financial incentive to use VoIP to make national mobile calls, it is just as easy to do so. A number of local councils are already considering investing in palmtops loaded with PocketSkype as a way of saving on their telecoms spend.
Philadelphia City Council, which is building a 216 square kilometres wireless network, plans to convert the majority of its workers to a mobile VoIP network later this year. Thousands of council workers will exchange their council-owned mobile phones and use palmtops connected to the municipal network instead.
According to Diana Neff, the city’s chief technology officer, once the initial investment is made, the savings could be as much as $2-million a year.
”We are going to see many more VoIP providers,” says Peter George, executive director of the Mobile Data Association. ”BT’s whole network will be VoIP by 2012. It will simply become the way that telecoms is done. I’m sure the pricing plans of the whole industry will need to adjust to reflect that fundamental shift.”
George argues that mobile Skype users are not about to forego their Sim cards just yet. Although mobile VoIP networks clearly threaten to undermine the more established networks, he thinks that VoIP providers must first overcome a series of hurdles. PocketSkype is dependent on third-party infrastructure, and a public Wi-Fi connection normally has to be paid for, thus the cost of the call is not always as low as the call charge. ”PocketSkype users are not truly mobile as the user must remain within 100m of the access point while making the call,” he says.
George also says that we have been here before. In the early 1980s, Hutchinson Telecom (now 3) launched Rabbit Telecom, a short-lived mobile phone service that forced users to visit specific locations to make calls. Rabbit was a flop. But there are two significant differences this time around. First, the number of wireless access points is far greater. Second, there is a real price incentive for users to switch to mobile VoIP networks.
If you want to look at how popular mobile VoIP networks could be, you could do worse than travel to the British army base in Bergen, Germany. Since 2003, it has been running a nascent mobile VoIP network allowing soldiers to make extremely cheap calls home using ”soft phones” loaded on to the screen of their laptop computers.
”We use a multipoint mesh networking system that rolls out like a mini version of the cell phone network,” says Richard Lander of Locust World, the company that built the army’s network. ”What we have is a system providing wireless broadband over very large areas … but compared to the GSM networks it costs virtually nothing to set up.”
Two weeks ago, at a trade show in Singapore, a Norwegian company called IPdrum announced it had found yet another way of making very cheap mobile calls. The company has developed software and a special cable that turns a second mobile handset into a wireless ”gateway” for Skype’s VoIP software.
It is an elaborate solution that requires two mobile phone contracts and a ”friends and family” number or the use of ”free” minutes of talk time, but successful deployment means that virtually every subsequent call you make need only be charged at a local rate.
Another wireless technology, WiMax, sometimes referred to as ”Wi-Fi on steroids” is just around the corner. WiMax extends the range of wireless internet coverage from a few hundred metres to several kilometres. Although the standard is not expected to be ratified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers until December, major companies, including Intel, have already endorsed it and are building components that will be integrated into the next generation of laptop and palmtop computers.
Ofcom, the industry regulator, is wary about the prospect of the next generation of wide-area wireless networks, such as WiMax, that offer the potential to allow users to roam more freely.
Last week it proposed that ”[radio spectrum] licence holders should not be able to change the terms of their licence to offer mobile services similar to 3G until at least 2007”.
When WiMax operators are allowed to offer mobile VoIP services over their networks one thing is certain. The cost of air time is very likely to fall through the floor. – Guardian Unlimited Â