VoIP won't mean cheap mobile calls: T-Mobile

The age of cheap IP-based phone calls on your mobile handset may be a more difficult proposition than first thought. That's the disappointing news coming out of the annual 3GSM conference in Barcelona this week.

 

Hamid Akhavan, the chief executive of T-Mobile, tells journalists that VoIP won't do to mobile phones what Skype has done to the fixed-line business. Akhavan says (with obvious relief) that "all sorts of technical issues" exist in the task of connecting mobile phone networks to IP addresses and thus the much ballyhooed project of bringing price relief to the mobile phone sector seems ever distant. In all, VoIP over mobile networks will be a small business, he predicts.

And what about free calls, à la Skype-over-PC? An impossibility, Akhavan says. “When people talk about VOIP, they think free,” Akhavan told Macworld. “With any mobile service provided over the internet, you’re going to need to buy a data package.”

Perhaps the way forward is not VoIP, but IM. Or at least that's how Microsoft, Yahoo! and Vodafone see it. The three firms have agreed to launch a PC-to-mobile instant messaging service, bringing together two of the world's largest IM operators on the new platform. That should satisfy the teen market, anyhow.

Comments

[Jimbob]

Its interesting that 3 who has most dealt with Skype still requires the use of a normal voice channel for skype calls to work.

[Ian Thorpe]

When will people understand that Skype is just hype?
The internet protocol is a packet switched protocol, voice needs streamed communications. Wait till Skype has a decent sized subscriber base and watch internet performance crash. To make it work the central networks would have to quadruple their investment in infrastucture without being able to earn any extra revenue from their investment.
Question for webheads: When did any internet "next big thing" ever deliver? Get real.