GigaOM » voice-networks

U.S. Cellular to start selling a home phone service that still uses the mobile network

Kevin Fitchard — Fri, 31 May 2013 20:20:43 +0000

For $20 a month U.S. Cellular will sell you a home phone line starting June 7. No, U.S. Cellular isn’t becoming a local phone company. It’s using its CDMA cellular network instead of copper wires to deliver calls to wired and cordless phones.

Simply called Home Phone, the service is the same as Verizon’s Home Phone Connect or Sprint’s Connect 2 – a way of squeezing whatever life is left out of the home voice market. As more and more traffic migrates over to data networks, carriers are finding they have a lot of excess space on their voice networks. Why not put that capacity to use in the residential market?

The home device is basically a switch you plug your home phones into. The device then converts your conversation into a CDMA signal which traverses the airwaves to the nearest cell tower. U.S. Cellular will sell the device for a penny in its stores June 7 and online June 20, and for your $20 monthly fee, you get unlimited voice, voicemail, caller ID, call waiting and forwarding and three-way calling. You can’t use SMS, and U.S. Cellular’s data networks are off limits with the switch. You can also port your old home phone number to the device.

Of course, you might figure if you get a U.S. Cellular signal in your home, why even bother with a separate home line? That’s why the service is so much cheaper than a regular mobile phone service. Not everyone will bite, but unless U.S. Cellular suddenly starts experiencing a huge uptick in mobile voice traffic, it’s got nothing to lose.

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AT&T starts replacing 2G with HSPA in NYC

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 23 May 2012 18:51:19 +0000

It looks like we were right about AT&T sunsetting its 2G networks to make way for more mobile broadband capacity. On Wednesday, Ma Bell announced it would ‘refarm’ PCS spectrum in New York City currently occupied by its GSM voice networks for new “3G and 4G” services.

That means AT&T is expanding its HSPA network — which it calls 4G – to account for the increasing data load the iPhone and other 3G smartphones are placing on its mobile broadband infrastructure. AT&T runs LTE in NYC, as well, but in a different band. Meanwhile, the backbone of its HSPA service already rides over its PCS frequencies.

In March, AT&T started contacting customers with 2G only phones – specifically very old models that worked only on AT&T’s PCS frequencies – offering them free 3G replacements. AT&T isn’t shutting off 2G completely. It runs a considerable portion of its GSM network at the cellular frequency band, which all phones sold in recent years support. But if AT&T is trying to cull its subscriber base of PCS-only 2G phones, it’s a good sign it plans to shut down GSM at PCS entirely, reserving that band entirely for HSPA.

NYC is AT&T’s densest market so it’s the logical place to start. Unlike the its CDMA 3G counterpart, HSPA supports voice as well as data, so AT&T really isn’t sacrificing any voice capacity. It gains the benefits of a far faster and more efficient mobile broadband network that puts GSM/EDGE sub-megabit speeds to shame. AT&T also may be working with its 3G vendors Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent to use new configurable bandwidth technologies to gradually shift GSM capacity to HSPA, as opposed to shutting off a huge chunk of its 2G network at once.

Refarming has become a popular trend among U.S. carriers in the last year. T-Mobile is shutting down a large portion of its GSM network to make room for a nationwide LTE rollout and more HSPA capacity. Meanwhile, Sprint plans to retire its Nextel iDEN network by 2014 in order to reuse its 800 MHz frequencies for CDMA and LTE.

Image courtesy of Flickr user joey.parsons

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Is Apple planning its own mobile voice service?

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:25:04 +0000

Light Reading has dug up some very interesting job postings on Apple’s website. Apple is looking for telephony software engineers to work on iOS. Judging by the list of experience requirements in the postings, Apple is looking to add voice-over-IP (VoIP) capabilities to the iPhone and iPad operating system’s ever-growing feature set.

STOP!

I know what you’re thinking. Apple is finally going to shed the carrier albatross completely and launch its own voice service. But there are plenty of good reasons Apple is hiring VoIP developers that don’t spell the end of the mobile operator’s core business.

In fact, Apple is probably making these hires precisely because it plans to work closely with its carrier partners. The skill set Apple is looking for fits well with the VoIP schemes operators plan to utilize for their next-generation voice services. It’s looking for experience with a set of protocols that may seem like gobbledygook to most people but are well-known to telecom engineers: IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), session initiation protocol (SIP), and real-time transport protocol (RTP), as well as the more familiar wireless network standards GSM/UMTS and CDMA.

The one acronym to focus on is IMS, which is a key component of the One Voice initiative that many of the world’s largest operators have adopted to migrate voice from circuit-switched systems to all-IP voice networks. The U.S. in particular is gung ho about IMS. Verizon Wireless and MetroPCS already use the architecture in their LTE networks, and AT&T and Sprint are implementing IMS to power their future voice and SMS services.

Future iPhones will need SIP-based clients to communicate with those carriers’ IMS cores, so it’s only natural that Apple is hiring experts to build them. I’m sure every other handset vendor is doing the same thing.

But what if . . .

Now I will entertain some of the Apple diehards’ bigger fantasies. There’s nothing preventing Apple from building a VoIP service of its own. Given the big dent Apple had already made in SMS with iMessage and how it yanked video chat right from under the operators’ noses with FaceTime, I wouldn’t be surprised if launching a competing voice service is in Apple’s road map.

The extreme scenarios are: 1) Apple becomes a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), buying wholesale 4G capacity from carriers, whom it would then relegate to dumb pipes, or 2) Apple buys its own spectrum and builds its own 4G networks. I find the first possibility only slightly less ridiculous than the second. Apple doesn’t want to become an operator for the same reasons Google doesn’t want to be one.

The more likely scenario is Apple launches a cross-device VoIP platform that allows customers to trade phone calls among iPhones, iPads and Macs. The beauty of VoIP is that it’s not just voice; it supports all kinds of features, from multimedia and video conferencing to instant messaging and presence that you simply can’t shove into legacy circuit networks. Apple could create an SIP-based communications platform that integrates FaceTime, iMessage and voice into a single multifaceted service, available exclusively to any member of the Apple club.

Whatever approach Apple takes, it’s probably not going to use IMS. It’s such a carrier architecture, coming with all sorts of telecom baggage. Also, Apple has no qualms with walling off its technology and it has a huge customer base to play with: It probably has no use for some stodgy telco standard. It was the IMS core responsible for all of Verizon’s recent network outages, which doesn’t recommend the standard to a company like Apple.

Apple is almost certainly looking for people with an IMS skill set so it can design future iPhones (and possibly iPads and Macs) that work with carriers’ new networks. But that doesn’t preclude it from dabbling in a little VoIP on the side.

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Could Skype in Your Pocket Beat the iPod Touch?

James Kendrick — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:00:32 +0000

VoIP is a hot form of communications for the savvy mobile consumer. Skype has millions of users, which shows how important VoIP has become to folks. While many mobile phones are capable of VoIP communications, many handset makers don’t promote that fact because of concerns about crossing the mobile carriers. The recent Google/Apple tussle over the banning of Google Voice from the iTunes App Store was reported to be instigated by AT&T.

The premiere iPod in Apple’s line of media players, the iPod touch has been described as an iPhone without the phone bits, and that’s pretty accurate — but it is capable of placing VoIP calls. The ability to have voice calls over the Internet for low cost or even free is easily done with the iPod touch due to the Wi-Fi functionality, but you don’t hear Apple selling that function. Doing so would raise the hackles of AT&T and Apple’s other carrier partners who, as a rule, don’t like the competition VoIP provides for their voice networks.

But do callers really need a carrier? If a company stepped in with a gadget similar to the iPod touch, equipped with heavily-promoted VoIP capabilities, such a device could be well received by the mobile crowd. A handset that trumpeted its ability to put “Skype in your pocket” (or a similar promotion) could be an instant hit with today’s cord-cutting consumers.

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