Wi-Fi – the key to ubiquitous mobile voice services
There is a global trend emerging, where large mobile telecommunication companies have and continue to buy up Wi-Fi providers, as they look to find ways to ease the ever increasing burden on the 3G and 4G networks. AT&T for instance gained access to 30,000 Wi-Fi sites through their acquisition of Wayport, along with strong iPhone sales, which basically paved the way for VoIP to be carried over mobile networks, a watershed moment for the industry. This firmly entrenched Wi-Fi as a major disruptive technology and earmarks the start of a new trend in mobile communications.
T-Mobile has also started building out their 3G network in the USA using Wi-Fi as part of their T-Mobile Home offering, which pulls home user telephony and data through terrestrial networks in conjunction with Wi-Fi. This appears to be a precursor to a move into true Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) – a technological shift that will make voice extensible over multiple networks and devices. In the same vein, Verizon is in the process of building a soft-client to enable Internet based mobile voice services for their 3,5 million users, another planned move towards enabling FMC.
The Director for Wireless at Cisco recently explained that South Africa is starting to follow this same trend. This will see mobile telecommunication providers using Internet Protocol (IP) to deliver mobile voice and data, allowing Wi-Fi to become augmented into their networks. The IP Multimedia System will bring 4G/LTE networks into the converged world, whereby topology becomes largely irrelevant.
In the past these disruptive technologies have only been seen by the carriers as revenue or churn minimisers, but they are now becoming a key aspect of the mobile voice value proposition. This is because the benefits of VoIP are numerous. It makes voice services ubiquitous and extensible, thereby increasing its reach and availability. With the trend towards VoIP over Wi-Fi it is also enabling users to keep more voice services on-net, which reduces costs and complexity. These reductions will drive a paradigm shift that the South African market has long been waiting for, which is a disintermediation of the current mobile communication license holder monopoly. By enabling multiple voice channels, through the addition and combination of new and existing technologies, the integration of the various on-net and off-net services will also become seamless – the utopian vision of FMC. What this means for end-users is a voice call that thinks for itself, to find the least cost route to the receiver of the call, be it over the fixed line, GSM or IP networks.
As we progress down the road of FMC we will start to see the integration of WiMax into these converged voice services, adding additional routes for data, thereby making it even cheaper. The challenge facing the incumbent mobile network operators is to try and manage the disruptive nature of these technologies to ensure they are used to compliment the current mobile services, rather than cannibalise them.
TAMMY DU PREEZ
Communications Manager
Tel: 087 365 7768
Tel: +27 (11) 575 7768
Fax: +27 (11) 576 7768 |