Mobile VoIP is proving to be a hot topic at this year’s ITEXPO East, currently underway in Miami, Florida.
The latest conference, ‘Taking VoIP Mobile’, included Scott Wooster, Marketing Manager at Dialogic, Trent Johnson, Chief Executive Officer of Hookflash, Erik Lagerway, Commercial Communications General Manager and Vice President at Ziplocal and tech website TMC’s reporter Tom Keating among the moderators.
Many surveys recently carried out by marketing analysts have shown that the rate of uptake of IP telephony for many business phone systems is increasing fast, and the general consensus is that the next phase in VoIP will see more mobile phone users taking advantage of the significant savings offered by the technology. As such, the first point of order was to define what mobile VoIP actually is and what benefits can be had from it.
Wooster commented that mobile VoIP used SIP trunking to deliver the robust features that people are used to from earlier iterations of the technology.
Lagerway concurred, but pointed out that many users are not clear on the differences between mobile/fixed convergences when compared to mobile VoIP. He said that the latter is when any portable device, be it a mobile phone or latest gen iPod, has IP telephony capabilities.
Trent Johnson declared that mobile VoIP is emerging from a transitional phase, as it leaves behind traditional communications infrastructures and time-division multiplexing (TDM) technology to offer services across a broadband connection.
Businesses are usually the first to take advantage of emerging communications technology on a wholesale basis, but the panel all agreed that the consumer market was adopting the technology at an increasing rate.
However, inroads were still being made into the business environment, with hardware manufacturers like Polycom teaming up with Microsoft to make an impression on the market.
