Nokia sees handheld VOIP revolution

By Leon Engelbrecht for Nokia
Johannesburg, 01 Oct 2007

Nokia sees the high cost of telephony in SA driving consumers into the lower cost voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) space.

Matt Rothschild, Nokia's Middle East and Africa GM for enterprise solutions, says this will increasingly also be the case for mobile phone users.

Nokia SA senior sales manager for enterprise solutions Richard Vester adds that some local Internet service providers can already provide cellular calls for as little as 17c a minute. This compares with R2.85 for a typical MTN contract holder and R1.85 for a pay-as-you go subscriber.

"VOIP is going to be a big player in the future... there is going to be a massive amount of cost reduction in that space," says Vester. "How operators will respond to it remains to be seen. South Africans can already use this technology to slash costs."

Vester says it is not clear how SA's mobile providers will respond to mobile VOIP. "There's no doubt the operators can see exactly what traffic is going through their networks. They are not blocking it yet."

Rothschild says mobile operators in other Nokia markets, such as Singapore, have responded positively to the challenge. "They've recognised the potential of bringing all this together."

He notes that a mobile provider there now offers clients a wireless router with Internet access. "When you go home, your [Nokia] E65 logs onto the router, giving you free VOIP calls in Singapore and low-cost international calls. When you leave home, you are a GSM customer. It is a smart play because it keeps customers on their network and gives them a low-cost service tailored for their needs."

Future phones

Vester adds that convergence is accelerating in handsets. "There is convergence between security on the device and the mobilising of e-mail, of applications - this will be used much more by business in the future, the voice functionality, VOIP integrated into wireless LAN. All of these things are already being integrated into devices."

Going forward, he says: "These are all going to thread together in a tighter fashion because you are going to see corporates mobilising applications.

"Middleware will allow all the building blocks one wants, from wireless e-mail right to application synchronisation and device management on top, so that the administrators can manage the device, push VOIP settings down to the device [and so on]."

Vester foresees that, in the enterprises space, mobile handsets will increasingly become company assets. "So you will see more companies go out and buy devices and manage them as if they are laptops."