Voip provider review

Byline: Kevin Fitchard

EARLIER THIS YEAR, NET2PHONE BEGAN QUIETLY distributing to channel partners what looked like a rather bulky cell phone. The plain, unmarked gray handsets weren't cellular devices, however - they were 802.11 phones that transmitted IP voice over unlicensed spectrum. Net2Phone was moving in a new direction: It was taking its broadband voice-over-IP technology and making it portable.

Net2Phone has always been known as an industry leader, but wireless isn't exactly its forte - that would be VoIP. The company launched the first VoIP service in the mid-1990s, and while the predominantly dial-up market wasn't ready for IP telephony at that time, the service laid the foundations for the VoIP craze we're experiencing today. Now, Net2Phone and other VoIP providers think the market is ready for the next stage of the technology's evolution: wireless/wireline convergence.

"We're building on what we launched with our voice-line service," said David Span, vice president of product management and marketing for Net2Phone. DSL, cable modems - these are all just edge technologies that enable VoIP, Span explained.

"Wi-Fi is just another edge technology," he said. "The difference is Wi-Fi gives you mobility."

As wireless/wireline convergence gains momentum outside of vertical markets, its biggest proponents aren't the big wireless carriers, the IOCs or even the RBOCs. They are the VoIP providers, all of which have some kind of wireless initiative in the works. Last month, Vonage and Boingo Wireless partnered to deliver the former's VoIP service over the latter's nationwide network of hot spots. Meanwhile, peer-to-peer IP telephony upstart Skype introduced software that can be loaded into voice-enabled PDAs, turning them into softphones over any 802.11 network.

"So much of the focus on the wireless convergence has been in the enterprise space, but it is slowly shifting over to the consumer space," said Frank Hanzlik, managing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance. "VoIP providers like Vonage and Net2Phone are pushing that envelope."

IN MANY WAYS IT'S FITTING THAT THE BROADBAND VoIP providers are the first to pursue voice over Wi-Fi. All voice convergence strategies - whether wireline to cellular, cellular to Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi to wireline - have one thing in common: voice over IP is the technology linking them together.

While it's possible to flip-flop between the TDM cellular network and the TDM POTS network, the nightmare of integrating those two legacy networks into a single platform that discretely handles multiple connections under a single phone number is more than most technologists would want to tackle. And unless someone figures out a way to route a circuit-switched call through an access point, Wi-Fi would be left out of the equation entirely.

The fact that VoIP is based on open standards pervasive across today's data infrastructure makes it the natural candidate to effect that convergence. Consequently, every carrier that has talked about wireless/wireline convergence has mentioned VoIP.

VoIP may be the technology that bridges the gap, but there are still some critical elements of its structure in need of redesign. Net2Phone's Wi-Fi service is now commercially available to all its resellers and carrier partners, but Span is the first to admit that the technology behind it needs some work for it to achieve true seamlessness. Net2Phone is targeting the service to its business users, either those mobile professionals who travel enough to seek out public hot spots for making voice calls or subscribers wanting to blur the line between home and work. The problem is that a customer can't just wander under an access point and start making calls - he has to log in and authenticate service in each hot spot, and there is no call handoff between access points if that customer is wandering through a hot zone, for example.

Span cautioned that VoIP is not a cellular replacement service-Net2Phone is focusing more on the concept of portability than mobility. But within those parameters, the company is trying to make the service as seamless as possible. Net2Phone has programmed its phones to recognize known networks and their log-in and authentication protocols, reducing a customer's IT involvement to a prompt.

In addition, Net2Phone has taken pains to treat the IP phone as an extension of the network, not an independent agent. It's enabled call forking, causing a customer's home extension and a Wi-Fi phone logged into a wireless network to ring simultaneously. Whichever device answers first establishes the connection, and the user can define how his Wi-Fi phone behaves, placing more or less emphasis on his portable device or home line.

Span said it's critical that as much of the intricate machinations in establishing those connections be as transparent as possible.

"If this becomes a total tech play, it will never get into the mass market," Span said. "It has to be very simple. If there's a connection out there, the phone will go find it."

The problem is finding those connections. While it's easy to establish a Wi-Fi connection through a home wireless gateway or over the corporate LAN, the prospects of finding one in between are far more limited. Net2Phone's service will log into any public (i.e., free) hot spot, but aside from the handful of communities and municipalities offering free Wi-Fi service and the few good souls that open their access points - often unwittingly - to the public, there are few free hot spots. The growing matrix of hot spots in airports, coffee shops and hotels is primarily built on a for-pay foundation.

Net2Phone said it is investigating the possibility of signing deals with hot spot providers, but even if it did so, there is only so much coverage it could achieve. The hot spot community is so disjointed and fragmented that only a handful of nationwide providers have more than a thousand hot spots. Most are spread among hundreds of providers, and though many have signed roaming agreements or joined together in aggregated networks, there is no system that allows more than a fraction of those networks to interoperate.

The challenge in pushing VoIP into hot spots isn't the access infrastructure, said Lynn Lucas, vice president of product marketing at Proxim. It's the backend billing - getting all of those disparate networks together. The problem has already been made painfully apparent in the business model for Wi-Fi data: A Wi-Fi user can be in an urban area surrounded by dozens of access points but won't be able to log into a single one of them unless he's willing to establish a separate billing relationship each time he moves onto a different network. Customers are already frustrated in the data realm; the problem will only be exacerbated when brought to voice, Lucas said.

"We still face challenges with data billing," Lucas said. "There's not a single national provider that will allow you to move from hot spot to hot spot on different networks using the same billing plan. The rollout of voice over Wi-Fi is doable, but from the customer's perspective, there has to be one network."

IF WI-FI IS THE KEY TO MAKING VoIP PORTABLE, cellular is the technology that will unlock true mobility. Many companies have touted the possibility of using VoIP and a Wi-Fi access card to create a device that functions as a home line within the confines of one's home network and as a cellular phone when it leaves the door. Surprisingly, one company raising such a possibility is SBC Communications.

As an RBOC, SBC is strongly invested in the public network - circuit-switched wireline telephony has been the basis of the Baby Bells' business since Ma Bell was created. All of the RBOCs have acknowledged VoIP as the technology of the future, and a few of them have launched limited business and residential services. But few in the telecom industry expected them to be among the first to fully embrace VoIP, let alone to propose a wireless/wireline convergence strategy built around the technology.

While SBC hasn't announced any launch dates or the details of specific service plans, chief technology officer Chris Rice said the carrier is definitely working with its Cingular Wireless subsidiary to launch a cellular/Wi-Fi phone. But first, it's starting with data. As SBC's FreedomLink Wi-Fi service grows from its 3900 current hot spots to the 20,000 projected by the end of 2006, the company will begin integrating Wi-Fi with Cingular's GPRS/EDGE services. Those efforts, coupled with a marketing push to bring Wi-Fi to the home - SBC in October said it was selling as many 3000 home Wi-Fi gateways a day to its DSL customers - will create wireless data penetration across wide area, local area and home networks. It's only another step to add voice to that mix, Rice said.