Mobile VoIP .... Voice over IP

Mobile VoIP has been in development for a short time now but only a small percentage of users are taking advantage of the increasing availability of the service. Mobile VoIP has the potential to decrease both domestic and international calling costs by routing calls through the Internet even when calls take place on the mobile phone. With the economy in a precarious position, people everywhere are looking to take advantage of ways to save money. This, along with a variety of other advances and improvements, has made it so that mobile VoIP is poised on the edge of taking off to become something big.

Economic Changes Driving Growth of Mobile VoIP

People in many parts of the globe right now are concerned about a changing economy with people in the United States being particularly worried about their financial state. However, the situation is not so dire that people are willing to give up their favorite services in order to save a buck. Instead, people are looking at ways to retain those services but to find a way to do so while paying a lower cost for those services than what they are currently paying. Mobile VoIP fits right in to that picture.
Mobile VoIP allows for free calling or low-cost calling between cell phones and from cell phones to landlines throughout the world. This is particularly great for people who make international calls but can even be great for people who are making local calls depending on the cell phone plan that they have in place. Many VoIP service providers offer free in-network calling to users who are on the same VoIP system which means that mobile VoIP can be activated on those systems to make all of those calls free.


Adoption of New Wireless Standard
One of the things that has made mobile VoIP somewhat unsuccessful in the past is that the method by which calls were transferred between access points on cell phones often resulted in long transfer delays which ultimately ended in dropped calls. Nobody wants to talk on the phone for long if the conversation is regularly interrupted by dropped calls so people who experienced this rapidly gave up on the idea that mobile VoIP could be a practical way to reduce their cell phone spending.

However, a new wireless standard was recently adopted which changes this situation for some users. The new standard, called IEEE 802.11r, allows for a much more rapid transition between access points which means that calls won’t be dropped during VoIP conversations on mobile phones. This system is more efficient and useful than what has been used in the past and sets the stage for a serious growth in mobile VoIP services in those areas that are impacted by the adoption of the new standard.

Currently this is primarily a benefit to enterprise-sized businesses which can afford the additional hardware technology used to really make internal mobile VoIP communications a cost-effective choice on a wide scale. However, it points to the possibility that the market in general is continuing to take a strong interest in the growth and development of mobile VoIP.

Good News and Bad From Nokia N Series
There was some news recently that actually made it seem as though Mobile VoIP was going to be experiencing a setback but which has turned out to prove only that people are highly interested in continuing to make mobile VoIP a more widespread reality. The news came from Nokia which announced that the new phones being released in its popular N Series line will no longer include mobile VoIP capabilities.

This announcement caused some concern among the niche group of people who had been making use of the service on their Nokia N Series phones. However, since the announcement, those people and the industry at large have come together to find solutions that allow people to continue using mobile VoIP on their Nokia N Series phones despite the change in design. TruPhone and Fring are two mobile VoIP companies that have created new software and replacement client functionality features to make sure that their clients can continue using mobile VoIP on these phones.

What this suggests is that people aren’t as willing to let go of the idea that mobile VoIP is a good service as they may have been in the recent past. Those users who do make use of the service already are really pushing hard to keep it as a usable feature of their phones. The indication is that this means that there is demand for mobile VoIP and therefore that the market for this service will not only sustain over the next few years but will actually grow.

Skype On Board with Mobile Service
One of the VoIP companies that has been around the longest and which is one of the most popular VoIP services to this day is Skype. Although the company has had its ups and downs in recent years, it continues to try to take leaps forward in terms of innovation in the VoIP industry. One such area in which that has recently occurred is the area of mobile VoIP. Skype recently announced the introduction of a beta version of a mobile Skype application designed to run on phones utilizing the Java platform. If this leader in the VoIP industry can make some headway and gain some attention with a great mobile VoIP product then it is likely that the company will be followed by a number of other businesses seeking to get in on a piece of the mobile VoIP pie.

Predictions for Mobile VoIP
The signs all point to the fact that mobile VoIP services are growing in popularity among cell phone users worldwide. This has led to predictions about the statistical growth of the mobile VoIP market. One oft-cited prediction is that mobile VoIP services are going to generate over $33 billion by 2011 which is a significant leap from the approximately half-billion dollars generated by the industry in 2006.