Cloudy with a Chance of VoIP
The industry implications of the 3 Skypephone’s “Best Mobile Handset” Silver Medal win back at the Mobile World Congress certainly sparked interest over at Wireless Week, and in her article “Around the World with VoIP” journalist Monica Alleven looked to iSkoot to get the insider perspective on the ostensible push for VoIP-enabled handsets.
In an interview, our CEO Mark Jacobstein affirmed that “getting the nod from the GSMA awards was a big thrill, and iSkoot is getting inquiries from operators around the world, including North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. It’s fair to say there’s a high degree of interest both for solutions with brands like Skype and for white-label solutions.”
Monica surmises that operators are going to inevitably beef up their data networks to meet consumer demand for mobile broadband. So couldn’t they–in theory–offer their own flavor of mobile VoIP?
Mark explains that “much like voice mail or any number of other services that carriers provide using third-party specialists, the same can happen with VoIP. iSkoot can power [carriers'] VoIP solutions with any number of VoIP communities or provide a white-label solution. And with IP, iSkoot can boost voice minutes without requiring carriers to pay termination fees, historically a big expense.”
Mark went on to espouse the carrier-friendly aspects of the iSkoot solution, one of many features that makes our VoIP-enabling technology unique.
“A big differentiator for iSkoot is it uses the voice channel, not the data channel. That’s far more operator-friendly than a lot of other solutions. Plus, [in the case of the 3 Skypephone] iSkoot is deep in the stack, so it’s not just an application. It’s tied into the call log and address book and uses a gateway that sits inside the carrier’s network operations center, allowing the connection between mobile devices and the IP cloud.”
Monica’s conclusion: “A lot remains to be seen in terms of how U.S. operators incorporate VoIP into their offerings. In the meantime, to say the VoIP players have their heads in the clouds could mean a very good thing.”
We like to think so. 
