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Archive for the ‘VOIP’ Category

BT shows off dual-mode ToGo

The rumours were true: BT has gone for another bite of the dual mode cherry, using an HTC smartphone, pictured here, called the BT ToGo. The dual-mode device will come bundled as part of BT’s Total Broadband Anywhere package - which covers home broadband, as well as mobile minutes, texts and 10 MB of mobile data. The phone itself will be free, and depending on how many minutes the customer signs up to, and the mobile subscription will cost between £5 and £35 extra on top of a standalone broadband option.

The problem with this, as far as I can see, is that this sort of thing screams enterprise, rather than consumer. For companies with large campuses and a lot of mobile workers, this could easily be a good fit. For consumers, however, I’m not so sure: after all, broadband tends to be bought by a household, and mobile phone contracts by the individual. There doesn’t seem to be any interesting new services being offered, so presumably the inclusion of VoIP capability is just being pitched as a cost-saving service: but with very generous mobile packages - up to 600 inclusive minutes - you could go without using the VoIP part of the service altogether.

BT to relaunch Fusion with own-brand HTC?

Interesting news out of BT: according to a report in The Telegraph BT is set to debut an own-brand smartphone from HTC today.

The Telegraph reckons it will run “off BT’s Home Hubs in residential settings, and switch across to the Vodafone mobile network when out and about”Interesting news out of BT: according to a report in The Telegraph BT is set to debut an own-brand smartphone from HTC today.

The Telegraph reckons it will run “off BT’s Home Hubs in residential settings, and switch across to the Vodafone mobile network when out and about”

Having divested itself of its mobile arm some years ago and stumbled somewhat with its last mobile offering, the dual-mode VoIP/cellular service BT Fusion, it could well be a bit of an uphill struggle for the incumbent to sell mobile services to consumers again. If the Telegraph is right, then this just looks Fusion by another name: without a raft of must-have devices, better pricing or at least some new services, I’m not really sure how BT thinks Fusion will fly this time around.

Mobile Skype ready for testing on Java phones

After flirting with mobile VoIP for a while, Skype looks like it’s about to get properly stuck in. The company’s announced that it’s brought out a beta version of the Skype client for “50 of the most popular Java-enabled mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson”.

All the usual features are enabled - chat, presence, getting calls from Skype users or through SkypeIn - for everyone, but for those in seven lucky markets (Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) there’s also outbound Skype-toSkype calls and SkypeOut functionality enabled.

The software is just a test release at the moment and its trial phase is expected to last several months. Working out whether a regular mobile or a Skype call is cheaper can still be a bit of a fiddly business and the limited functionality is a bit of a blow for those outside the seven countries Skype has given the nod, but still good to see Skype gearing up for a full-on mobile attack.

Truphone lands £16.5m funding lift

Mobile VoIP company Truphone has pulled in £16.5 million in new venture capital funding from private investors, as well as its existing backers Burda Digital Ventures, Eden Ventures, Independent News & Media, Straub Ventures and Wellington Partners.

Truphone said it will use the cash injection to develop its idea of a global SIM that gives free VoIP calls over wi-fi when there’s a hotspot around and cheap GSM mobile calls when there’s not, and to add new internet features to its service in the future.

It looks like there’s some serious momentum around Truphone at the moment - along with the funding, the company bought SIM4travel, which sells cheap roaming minutes to travellers. It’s looking like Truphone is fast getting all the piece in place for an assault on the mass market.

Truphone snaps up SIM4travel for £1.3m

VoIP company Truphone has announced it has bought up the strategic assets of SIM4travel, which sells low cost roaming minutes and texts to European travellers, comprising its mobile virtual network enabler and its travel SIM capabilities. The acquisition cost Truphone £1.343 million in cash and £1.3 million in shares.

Truphone says it will start integrating SIM4travel’s GSM goodies with its own VoIP ones right away and reckons it will be several months before it’s done.

Truphone is better known for its wi-fi calling/texting service, so this acquisition will see them combining that with cheap GSM services. It’s going to be seriously interesting to see what the combined Truphone-SIM4Travel will look like - could we be witnessing the birth of Truphone as a fully-fledge MVNO?

Vyke hits the Nokia Download store

Good news for the team at Vyke — their Mobile VoIP service is now availalbe in Nokia’s Download store. Which must put it on.. what.. a good few million handsets right-away. They’re passionate folk at Vyke — I met Aaron a while ago and found him a switched on chap — so I’m sure they’ll be delighted at this news.

If you haven’t checked out your download store recently, have a look. You should hopefully find Vyke there.

Vyke’s mobile VoIP software is found in the Download store, which is located in the main menu of compatible Nokia mobile phones. Once the download is started, the software installation and set-up process takes approximately 2 minutes to create the user’s Vyke account and top it up with $1 of free calling credit.

Let’s hear from CMO Jan Christian Berger:

“We are delighted to offer this greatly improved service with Nokia. Our new account creation and top-up features enable any new user to make mobile VoIP calls in just a matter of minutes. With access to our service directly from any The Cloud hotspot and our $0.04 per call and $0.00 per minute pricing for calls to landlines in Western Europe or any number in North America, the value we are creating for users is very compelling.”

Any Cloud hotspot? Wow. There are tons of The Cloud hotspots across the UK. I’ll need to try that out.

Thankfully Vyke will work on almost any decent E and N-Series Nokia handset including the E90.

T-Mobile gets into home phone biz

After entering an unlimited voice price war with AT&T and Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile has pulled off another interesting move and decided to getting into the home phone game with VoIP.

It will be offering subscribers a router to connect to their home phone - it’s around $50 - and once the box is up and running, T-Mobile customers will be able to make local and long distance calls in the US for the price of $10, as long as they’re already existing mobile customers of T-Mobile.

The service is being tested in Dallas and Seattle. It sounds like a handy way for the operator to take on telcos with both a fixed and mobile business, but I’m not quite sure how it will sit alongside the companies all-you-can-eat mobile voice plans. Presumably one for the lighter users out there?

Fring Lets You Send Files, Goes Native

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Fring, the free instant messaging/MOIP (Mobile VOIP) client, has announced an update for S60v3 users that adds new features and offers the ability to transfer files! Currently only for Gtalk and Skype, but coming soon to the other IM protocols, you can transfer files between mobiles, and also from mobile to PC. This makes it killer-easy to send pictures or video clips to friends while chatting.

Other improvements include new support for other languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Chinese. The application will even automatically check to see what language your handset is using upon installation, automatically matching it if possible. The chat function has also gotten an update, with new icons and the ability to set the d-pad center to start a chat rather than a phone call.

Head on over to Fring.com to get setup if you have an S60 handset. The update should be available for Windows Mobile handsets soon.

BT Fusion: Not dead, just having a refit

According to a number of reports, the BBC among them, BT has been forced to have a major rethink over its Fusion product, where one handset is used to make calls over both VoIP and mobile networks, after poor takeup.

According to those reports, BT is not dropping the service, but is going to start focusing on a more data-centric offering with a dual-mode BlackBerry-type device, and pushing the service as an enterprise product.

It’s a bit of a shame that Fusion never really took off. It was, if nothing else, an attempt to take mobile somewhere different and kill off the landline for good. That said, the tiny range of handsets was bound to put gadget-conscious users off and the pricing wasn’t as competitive as it could have been. Hopefully it’ll get a new lease of life - not to mention some whizz-bang applications - as an enterprise play.

Hictu Says ‘Hi’ Through Jajah

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Hictu and Jajah today announced that Jajah will be integrated into Hictu’s micro-blogging service, adding more convenience to users than ever before. Hictu is a popular micro-blogging too that allows users to easily publish video, text, and audio messages to share easily with friends, family, or whoever else. The Hictu website allows direct recording of both video and audio, and now supports Jajah, allowing users to quickly and easily get in touch with each other.

Jajah sees the move as an opportunity to help social communities grow and will allow Hictu users to easily talkfrom their phone with any other Jajah customer or with any user who has previously registered a phone number in the Jajah section of their Hictu profile.

Babelfish for Phones Possible?

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It might be a stretch, but Google has introduced new Bots for its Google Talk service that will automatically translate IM conversations on the fly. For it to work, both chatters must add the appropriate bot to the conversation, and off it goes. For instance, if I wanted to chat with someone in Germany, I would add the German-to-English bot, and they would add the English-to-German bot, and we would then chat as normal, with the bots making it all easy cheesy.

This got me thinking about the possibility of an application that could do this through your phone (or over Skype or some other VOIP application). What if you could call someone in a foreign country and chat with them as if you were both chatting in your native tongue?

I don’t know how far off this is, but if it’s in IM, surely it can’t be too much more difficult or far off to add a text-to-speech feature, and then a speech-to-text on the other end, and then make all that happen directly on the handset, with a translator in the middle.

Things like this would really make VOIP something exciting, in my opinion, but there’s also other entertainment values as well. Think women speaking in foreign languages are hot? Does your wife nag you all the time on the phone? Next time she calls, why not switch her into French? It’s not like she expects you to remember what she’s said anyways, and at least then it’s a pleasureable conversation for you.

Any other great business opportunities you can think of with this?

What’s going on with RebTel?

Has anyone heard much about RebTel? I really liked their concept — and some friends of mine used the RebTel service for hours daily whilst they were doing intercontinental dating — however I haven’t heard much from them recently.

What have you heard?

250 Mobile VOIP users by million by 2012?

A new research study from Disruptive Analysis (from the blogosphere’s very own Dean Bubley) shows that evolution of mobile VoIP will rapidly eclipse voice over WiFi and become a mainstream form of communication.

The analyst firm predicts that the number of VoIPo3G users could grow from virtually zero in 2007 to over 250m by the end of 2012. This is comfortably in excess of the expected number of FMC users with dual-mode VoWLAN/cellular phones.

The key point, of course, is the word could. I can see that. I can also see it going quite a few other ways depending on how things pan out with the stratospheric shifts going on in the marketplace today. 2012 used to sound like a long time away when we were in the year 1999, but it’s only — what… 5 years away now?

The report demonstrates that it will be the operators themselves which will be mainly responsible for the push towards VoIP being carried over cellular networks. Carriers will become increasingly attracted to VoIPo3G because it will enable them to fit more phone calls into their scarce spectrum allocations, reduce operating expenses by combining fixed and mobile core networks, and launch new services like push-to-talk and voice-integrated “mashups”.

VoIPo3G also fits well with the move towards femtocells. Future generations of wireless technology – 3GPP LTE (Long Term Evolution), 3GPP2 UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband), WiMAX – are “all-IP”, so unless mobile operators continue to run separate voice networks in parallel, they will inevitably transition to VoIP at some point.

What do you reckon?

\You can read more — and get more information on Disruptive Analysis at www.disruptive-analysis.com/.

3 Skypephone unboxing

Here’s a quick video I took of the unboxing of the 3 Skypephone.

It’s a very straight forward, no nonsense device:

I just took it out the box, stuck it into my USB port on the Apple, left it for a while then started using it.

Loving the 3 Skype Phone

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I’ve been sat using the 3 Skype Phone for a day now and I’m loving it. I’m in the middle of a write-up about it, and the launch yesterday.

Skype launch mobile with 3

Although not officially unveiled until later today, we’ve got all the details of the new Skype mobile - launched in conjunction with mobile operator 3. Ewan will be at the press launch later, so expect pictures soon!

The 3 Skypephone is a fully-featured 3G Internet phone with Skype built-in. In addition to Skype calls the phone makes conventional calls and can be used to access 3’s broad range of other internet services.

The handset was developed by Skype and 3 in partnership with Qualcomm, using Qualcomm’s BREW platform to enable Skype to work with core handset features such as address book and messaging. It’s got 3G, a 2-megapixel camera, mp3 player, mobile TV and internet access.

According to the information available, it’s a “small and shiny” handset, weighing in at a tiny 86 grams, and comes in black or white, with a blue or pink trim. Standby time is 320 hours, with a talk time of 270 minutes or 170 minutes of video calling. The screen is a 176 x 220 2.0″ QCIF 262K colour display, and the handset itself has 16MB of external memory plus room for up to 1GB of microSD memory card (it comes with a 256M card as standard).

Price-wise, the 3 Skypephone will be available from 3Stores or on the web from 2nd November, at £49.99 on pay-as-you-go or free with a contract. You get free Skype to Skype calls included (as expected) as long as you’re on a contract or you top up your credit monthly.

More news as it comes in..

3UK and Skype’s Monday morning briefing

Both 3UK and Skype (already partnered with 3UK’s X-Series service), are planning a press briefing this coming Monday to talk about developments between the two companies.

I’ll be there, possibly liveblogging, although Stuart Dredge of TechDigest will probably be there too, MacBook in hand, typing away big time — so I might leave that to him. I watched him briefly at the Blyk launch and he was knocking out the words almost as they were said, straight into what looked like the TechDigest publishing system. I’m definitely bringing my camera though…

It’s going to be an interesting set of announcements, I’m sure.

Yeigo launches free calls & IM via data

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Yeigo is a South African based mobile phone network that uses the internet to connect users, bypassing operator call charges.

All you need is a data connection (3G or WiFi) and the Yeigo application does the rest.

Initially I thought this was a incoming dial service — i.e. you select the person you want to speak to and Yeigo then calls you both. However after a bit of close-up investigation, it seems Yeigo is data-based, that is, it sends your calls and instant messages via your operator’s 3g data channel or via wifi.

Obviously wifi is best, because if you try using Yeigo with a UK mobile operator, you’ll be charged in the region of 4 pounds/meg if you haven’t already signed up for an unlimited data plan. If you dare use it in Canada, you’ll be charged squillions/meg because of their ultra backward data charges.

Further, your average common-or-garden mobile operator in the United Kingdom doesn’t have much tolerance for users bypassing ridiculous mobile phone charges. e.g. You’re ok to use about 1,000mb of data on T-Mobile UK for about £7 per month… as LONG as you don’t dare use VOIP. Use VOIP and T-Mobile get nasty. Or quite simply prevent you from connecting in the first place, unless you upgrade to their top-level ~£25/month data plan.

Yeigo comes in two major flavours — Symbian or Windows Mobile…

Users who download the Symbian or Windows Mobile version of Yeigo to their mobile phones enjoy free calls and IM not just between UK-based mobiles, but between mobiles based anywhere in the world. And calls made from your mobile to landlines are significantly cheaper than what you would be charged by your operator. In addition, you can send SMSs from Yeigo to any destination in the world for substantially less than you would be charged by your operator.

But you can also run Yeigo on any java-enabled handset:

Yeigo has also introduced a Java version, Yeigo Lite – which allows users without a compatible phone for the Symbian or Windows Mobile versions – to use Yeigo’s innovative ConnectUs, IM and SMS services.

A note on data usage: The Yeigo site helpfully lists the approximate data costs and usage expecations. For example, the site advises that you will use around 100kb of data, per minute, during a call (so roughly 5.75mb per hour).

It looks like a smart service that could be particularly useful if you speak regularly to friends and family abroad and you’ve got WiFI nearby.

I’m going to download the application and give it a go shortly.

Truphone add easy global VOIP wi-fi roaming

Truphone, the UK-based mobile Internet network operator, is broadening international public Wi-Fi access for its customers and automating the Wi-Fi login process at these global locations through a new agreement with Quiconnect.  This will build on and augment existing public Wi-Fi access already established by Truphone while making it far simpler and faster for its customers to make mobile VoIP calls in public places, both in the UK or abroad.

Truphone uses the Internet to deliver voice calls for customers without requiring a separate handset to be used,  as calls can be made on mass market Nokia mobile phones. Just like Skype did with PC-based VoIP calling, Truphone is making mobile VoIP a reality today worldwide.  Using open source and standards-based software, Truphone calls are routed over Wi-Fi using SIP[1] and RTP[2] .

According to analysts, ON World Inc, the mobile VoIP market will see staggering growth with 70.6 million consumer cell-VoIP users expected by 2011, up from 480,000 last year.

Truphone will licence Quiconnect’s Connector software, embedding it into its own solution, so that customers’ handsets will automatically be authenticated at public Wi-Fi locations when in range. This means the cumbersome process of inputting login details prior to making calls is avoided as all the credentials and various scripts required for a customer to log onto a network are already preloaded.  Truphone customers can therefore be completely focused on what they really want to do and that is to make telephone calls rather than worrying about access and log in.

As part of the agreement, Quiconnect will create a virtual Wi-Fi network for Truphone so that customers can access the Truphone service from public Wi-Fi hotspots across the world, including the most important, high traffic locations such as hotels, airports, conference centres, coffee shops and train stations.

Since active interconnections commenced in 2001, Quiconnect has built extensive virtual public Wi-Fi networks for its customers establishing numerous agreements with the world’s leading telecoms companies and network operators and connecting them to its platform.  This includes BT, Sprint Nextel, SFR, VSNL, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, various Chinese operators along with numerous network operators globally.

Over the next 12 months, Quiconnect will be establishing multiple relationships for Truphone with a number of companies, focused on the USA and Europe initially, so that customers travelling abroad can avoid paying GSM roaming charges by making and receiving low cost VoIP calls (where legal) on their mobiles.  Quiconnect is also providing all the necessary financial and clearing house intermediary services to facilitate this.

Luke Vinogradov, Quiconnect’s senior marketing manager, new products, says, “For the first time, we will be adding presence capabilities and creating arrangements with local Wi-Fi operators whereby Truphone customers don’t need to have local subscriptions with operators to access their networks.  Presence capabilities means customers will be automatically logged in at Wi-Fi locations but will only pay once a mobile VoIP call is made just like in the GSM world.  This is fundamentally different from current Wi-Fi pricing models, where you start paying when you connect to a hotspot. We expect this new approach to pricing to make mobile VoIP usage explode.”

James Tagg, Truphone’s founder and CEO, says “Quiconnect does two important things for Truphone: it makes thousands of public Wi-Fi locations worldwide accessible and makes it easy to connect to them. Our customers can now just take their phones out in these public locations and make Truphone calls without even thinking about it.”

Truphone selected Quiconnect as its public Wi-Fi integration partner because of its extensive wireless broadband industry expertise, new approaches to support innovative Wi-Fi pricing models, the broad relationships established with service providers and network operators, as well as technologies developed like Connector software.

Ali Khan, Truphone’s director of business development says, “Going to each and every network vendor or service provider to establish agreements would be hugely time consuming.  Working with Quiconnect centralises all this and capitalises on what they have already done.  This means rapid network creation for us so that users can get pervasive access, plus clearly an opportunity for local Wi-Fi providers to increase revenue from their infrastructure by capitalising on the interest in mobile VoIP.”

Truphone is the first company to take advantage of Quiconnect’s new range of solutions for application providers to make its services available over wireless broadband.  This includes connectivity tools for automated login of mobile devices on commercial Wi-Fi hotspots (Connector software); network integration and management services to connect large networks spanning multiple operators and geographies; and data and financial clearing services which provide flexible charging models based on the device used and application.

3UK and Skype to launch joint handset

Yet another example of the progressive nature of the team at 3UK. Fantastic. I wonder how the market will react to this. We’ll see. And we’ll get a handset and put it through it’s paces soon.

Link: Skype To Launch Own Mobile Phone

Skype is planning to launch its own mobile handset this month, following in the footsteps of Apple, and the all but confirmed mobile phone from Google.

According to BusinessWeek, Skype will offer the handset in conjunction with 3 Mobile in “late October” in Britain, Italy, Hong Kong, and Australia, with the 5 remaining 3 Mobile terrotories to follow. For anyone who has ever looked on in envy at tech rollouts in the United States, there are no plans at this stage to launch the mobile phone State side

Vonage still alive in the UK it seems

I was pleased, from one perspective, to read that Vonage is still drifting along in the United Kingdom. They’ve just hired a new agency to BOOOOST direct-customer-contact. I always liked the concept of Vonage. I was one of their first UK customers. But I was failed, not necessarily by Vonage, but by the ridiculously rubbish broadband speeds in suburban Essex (30 miles from London).

Twice, I used Vonage to make outgoing phone calls. Both times I had to redial the person I was speaking to on my normal landline because the quality was so poor.

I used Vonage to get incoming calls…. until, again, I had to redial people because I couldn’t hear them — or vice versa. Just terrible.

There wasn’t enough throughput on the top of the line expensive broadband connection I was using.

I daresay Vonage works fine if you live in Central London 100 metres from the exchange. But if you’re sat in suburban land surrounded by kids leeching Youtube all day, your 2mb broadband connection is likely to offer 10-15k/sec real data throughput… which will keep MSN working but not much else.

Link: Netimperative - Vonage hires Profero for UK marketing drive

Internet phone company Vonage has appointed Profero Performance to update its digital customer acquisition strategy with a six-figure campaign.

Vonage aims to challenge the traditional fixed line and low-cost international call carriers by promoting its internet phone service to specific UK consumer segments.

So, it doesn’t matter how good the marketing is… if your home internet connection is rubbish, your Vonage service will be rubbish too.

(I dumped my Vonage service a while ago… if you’re having a good experience with it, do email me so I can document a positive perspective too. You can read about my horrific Vonage experiences here…)

Lypp now works within Facebook / GTalk

I really like this. If you’ve got the new Google Talk application on your Facebook profile, you can add Lypp as a buddy and set-up conference calls via Gtalk within your browser. Nifty!

Link: Great New Facebook GTalk App (Lypp - VoIP API, VoIP Mashups)

We couldn’t resist using the slick new GTalk Facebook app as an opportunity to showcase calling and group calling within Facebook using Lypp.

While I’m in LA, I’m going to try and meet with Dan and Erik from Lypp to find out more about what they’re doing.

Truphone drop call charges

VoIP-on-your-mobile company Truphone has just dropped it’s call charges until December 31st 2007.

According to the company, not only are mobile calls free to landlines in 40 countries and to mobiles in the USA, Canada and elsewhere, but mobile rates across the EU are 15p/min or less and mobiles elsewhere in the world have been cut by an average of 23%.

According to James Tagg,  Truphone’s CEO: “Truphone’s new price proposition is especially compelling when you’re either abroad or are calling abroad. And what’s more, there are no roaming charges. Truphone calls cost the same from wherever you are.”

EBay overpaid for firm: Skype co-founder

Well I guess after that hiccup they had a couple months ago…

EBay said last week it would cut as much as $1.2 billion off the $4.3 billion potential price it agreed to pay for Web-based phone-calling service Skype two years ago.

The writedown on the value of the deal came as eBay said Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had resigned as executives, and marked a tacit admission of lackluster returns from Skype since eBay acquired it two years ago.

The cofounders stepped down before reaching earn-out targets in 2008 and 2009, but Zennstrom would not say whether that meant he would have definitely have missed them.

Avaya and Nokia bring FMC to business

Avaya and Nokia today announced the next phase of their strategic collaboration with a solution that provides users of Nokia Eseries business devices with one number access and advanced enterprise telephony capabilities as they travel across private Wi-Fi and public mobile networks. With a single mobile device, workers can “handoff” phone calls at the click of a button, using dual mode communications, as they travel from inside a company building (Wi-Fi) to the outside environment (mobile) – and vice versa.  This gives workers a more convenient and productive way to manage their communications, while giving organisations a more cost-effective approach to enterprise mobility.

The solution – Avaya one-X Mobile Dual Mode Edition – combines Internet protocol (IP)-based applications with Nokia Eseries business devices – the Nokia E60, Nokia E61 and Nokia E70 models – to deliver the full benefits of FMC. The offering includes a dual-mode device with Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) capabilities that can make and receive calls over both mobile and wireless local area networks (WLAN), both on and off a company campus.For example: when a worker is communicating while roaming inside company walls, the solution uses the company’s communications system and a secure Wi-Fi network. This drives cost savings by eliminating the need to use cellular minutes while at work. When the worker travels outside a company’s Wi-Fi network, they can handoff their Wi-Fi call to the cellular network outside by pressing a button, keeping their conversation going uninterrupted.
An organisation that is using Avaya mobility solutions to keep employees connected wherever they go is CNIPA, the Italian National Centre for Information Technologies in Public Administration.

“We recently planned to introduce VoIP technologies which would see the migration of a million desk phones to IP mode over three years,” said Stefano Paolucci, CNIPA CIO manager, the Italian National Centre for Information Technologies in Public Administration. “We are enthusiastic about the possibility of collaborating with Avaya to provide access to mobility services in our headquarters in Rome.  With an easy and quick installation system we are currently using WLAN and GSM dual-mode technologies to provide mobile access to PBX services such as call transfer, call registration and conference calls. Despite the complexity of our building – Mr. Paolucci continues - the communication through the continuous coverage of the Wi-fi network  is secured thanks to the various access points located on all floors and the connection from one point to another does not cause any sort of interference during the conversation. Not only has this resulted in increased mobility, but we have also reduced costs.”

“We’re finding that more and more businesses are using mobile devices in their telephony evolution cycle to deal with an increasingly virtual workforce,” said Nathan Dyer, Yankee Group senior analyst, Enterprise Mobility. “Apart from cost-savings, integrated Wi-Fi and cellular devices enable simplified management and greater enterprise control over wireless voice devices.”

Avaya one-X Mobile Edition and Nokia Eseries business devices deliver greater convenience, enhanced functionality, and improved security by giving workers one device for business and personal use, one number call access, and one voicemail message interface. Enterprise telephony features available with the dual mode solution include conferencing, transfer, and extension dialing – key capabilities enabling more productive communications for mobile workers. Security benefits include the ability to authenticate the Nokia Eseries device to a PBX, giving businesses greater control over wireless communications by allowing only authorised users to access the company’s systems.

“Bringing the functionality of the IP PBX to mobile devices over cellular and Wi-Fi to employees both inside and outside the office is one of the ways mobility is transforming the way business is done,” said Tom Furlong, vice president, Security & Mobile Connectivity, Nokia. “Working with a leading IP telephony provider like Avaya to extend their solutions to Nokia Eseries business devices is a key element to realizing the Nokia vision of connecting people using virtually any device over any network to any corporate application or data source.”

“Embedding Avaya mobility applications with Nokia dual mode technology represents a core part of Avaya’s vision of delivering Intelligent Communications to every worker, regardless of the network they’re on,” said Geoffrey Baird, Avaya vice president and general manager of Appliances, Mobile and Small Systems Division.  “This unifies a business’ voice applications, devices and networks to simplify communications for enterprise users wherever they go.  Greater productivity and savings are just the beginning of the benefits gained with dual mode mobility.”

Avaya will sell the mobile application as part of its IP telephony portfolio through its enterprise channels; Nokia will sell the solution through its operator and other channels. Both companies are investing research, development and marketing resources to realise the enterprise fixed mobile convergence market.

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