VoIP on Cell Phones – the next frontier for VoIPhreakers?

Here is a guest post from Matt Reedy:

If reducing your telephone expense is important to you, then VoIP (voice over IP) is probably already on your radar screen.  The cost to terminate a VoIP phone call from VoIP provider ooma to the PSTN ranges from 0.2 to 0.5 cents per minute. Yes, you read that right – one-fifth to one-half of a cent.  If you use 1,000 cell phone minutes a month and you could route those minutes over a VoIP provider, your provider would be paying a maximum of $5.00 per month to connect your calls (not counting the WiFi or 3G/4G access required to connect your phone to the VoIP provider).  Even with markups, that price certainly beats today’s $100 or $150 per month cell phone plans that offer 1,000 minutes. 

A recent article (http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/dual-perspectives/2009/04/20/The-End-of-the-Cell) reported that nearly 20% of Americans have “cut the cord” and discarded their landline service entirely.  With the cost of VoIP decreasing so rapidly, many of those early adopters have gone one step further and switched to mobile VoIP as their only phone service.  Granted, two significant developments need to occur in order for a major shift to VoIP over cell phones to occur.  First, WiFi (or WiMAX or 4G) access needs to become more ubiquitous.  They are already making significant inroads through several municipal WiFi projects and 4G rollouts, but in order to have more complete VoIP coverage, WiFi will have to be effectively “everywhere” and reliable.  Second, the cell phone providers will need to understand that they are most valuable to their customers by becoming data network providers instead of voice network providers.  However, we can already see the early stages of these developments, and it does not take too much imagination to envision a world with extremely low cost mobile voice connectivity via VoIP on cell phones.

The next question to ask is, “how are we going to secure these mobile VoIP calls?”  VPNs are certainly one way to insure privacy, but will they introduce too much delay and jitter into the voice conversation to be practical?  Telephone-based encryption is another method, but very few cell phones today are delivered with encryption mechanisms.  Since most VoIP calls use SIP (session initiation protocol), it is likely we will see SIP over TLS (transport layer security) and SRTP (secure real time protocol) becoming the dominant methods for securely carrying VoIP conversations on your cell phone from Starbucks.  If these calls are carried unsecured over a third party wireless network, then we are opening ourselves up to the next wave of phreakers seeking to use our phones to make free calls. 

Once we secure the calls, how do we manage them?  How do we enforce business management policies on these calls to ensure that our employees are not violating company regulations on their VoIP calls?  As you can see, there is still a good deal of grey area here.  But we need to get busy painting the grey white because the adoption of VoIP technologies is accelerating faster than we are able to keep up.

Comments

[Jeff Jones]

Very interesting. I’ll be reading more of your topics and recommending our customs.

Jeff Jones
ThinkBright.net - VOIP Internet Business PBX

[stefen34]

I appreciate the information u have given but i would like to mention here that there are a few vendors who are dealing with such issues and are providing the business voip solutions successfully.

[Cellular Philippine Phone]

Thanks for the information. I’ve been reading along I will be reading more of your posts in the future. Keep it up!

Bruce Yuan