Also, later variants of HSPA and LTE should get higher volumes of VoIP traffic than circuit-switched in the same capacity, owing to improvements like header compression. Latency will also improve in stages.

My take is that it will be a mix, varying by country, demographic, CDMA vs UMTS prevalence, frequency allocations, and device type. Independent VoIPo3G will be more important in markets with lots of competing operators, plenty of fully-open smartphones and plenty of scope for tariff arbitrage.

Another angle is whether there are more valuable applications for VoIP than basic person-to-person telephony. Embedding VoIP elements into games, enterprise apps, social network etc could enable pricing models that look very different from either per-minute, or plain flatrate data.

I’ll be commenting a lot more on all this over coming weeks and months.

Dean Bubley

An interesting question here is what role will Google Play if they teamed up with Muni Wireless Mesh Network (or new WiMAX)providers and handled all their VoiceIP Processing over an end to end Google Data Network (No need for the best effort internet here). They are about to launch their open standard VoiceIP Softphone and VoiceIP central management package that will reside in and be operated by them in their Fiber linked Data Centers(will be suprised if they do any Phone hardware).
So when combined with Intels new line of Centrino Pro CHips for Laptops and bluetooth links for headsets they have a built in soon to be ubiquitous customer base.

Jacomo

I think there is an overzealous use of terms such as “disruptive”, which although can be applied in some cases, I don’t think it flies when the technology is disrupting the very service it relies on in order to function. TASTAAFL*

• There ain’t such thing as a free lunch.

Clearwire — drop 20% since its IPO (at one time it went down by as much as 40%). Financial basketcase — losing hundreds of millions of dollars — and nobody is going to fund them the second time around.

Sprint Nextel — another financial basketcase that got much of their AWS spectrum auction funding from cable operators. It is the cable operators that are gaining big on the VoIP front (killing Vonage in subscriber net adds). Vonage’s sharp fall from its IPO — signals the end of pure-play VoIP companies.

Even the WiMAX trade group (the official cheerleader) is hyping only tens of millions subscribers world-wide for their technology — against (by that time) 4 billion mobile users.

T-Mobile USA — well if VoIP is such a killer — then its German landline parent DT will also be in the same boat as AT&T and Verizon. And if DT gets weak then TMO USA will also be weak as well.

a) It will be difficult for end users to install use applications;
b) The QoS will continue to lag behind normal calls;
c) The operators will put some barriers

Here some post from Dean Bubley’s blog on how European operators are limiting VoIP usage on 3G handsets.

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Francesco

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r.

The MNO’s biggest concern was VoIP, both because it drained revenue from the voice business and used so much more BW. Circuit on mobile is best case 4kbps, whereas VoIP was about 26kbps (16kbps plus overhead) best case and sometimes significantly more.

My suggestion at the time was fixed price downlink and per byte pricing on the uplink (above some reasonable limit). That way they wouldn’t have to block VoIP or P2P. The heavy users would end up paying $3-400 and all the normal users would get the benefit of fixed pricing. With the net neutality push, I wouldn’t surprised to see variable pricing again. It’s neutal and accomplishes the same thing… shut down Skype, Vonage and Joost.