Troubled voice over 3G

A few things have changed over the last month in the voice-over-internet arena since our last post about why there’s still no VoIP over 3G on the iPhone. Apple has finally given the green light for voice apps that use 3G mobile internet connection, and some of the developers have immediately jumped on the bandwagon. However, we’d like to remain cautious.

Even though it’s now technically possible to have an app for 3G voice calls, we still believe a lot has to be done both from operators and developers to improve quality of internet calls. Truphone is by no means ignoring this new iPhone functionality, yet unless we have something that offers a top quality Truphone experience, we’ll keep working on it.

And we’re not alone on this – in a recent article The Boston Globe says that even though the ‘concept is darn near irresistible’, according to them until the next generation 4G phone network is available, voice calls over mobile internet remain dubious.

In the meantime, we provide a solution in our apps that allows you to make calls outside a Wi-Fi zone – use Truphone as usual and your call will be routed via a local phone number in your home country, it still costs fraction of a usual international call price and the quality is superb.

(image via wikihow)

Comments

[kieran]

Right to be cautious. 3G may be good for download speeds, but upload speeds are not quite there yet... 45kb/s is what I see at best in my local area for upload... usually its lower... anything less than 10kb/s is bad for 3G calling. The voice quality needs to be encoded so if bandwidth drops, no drop of quality is noticed.

[Michael Holm]

One thing that I've allways wondered about, if you need to pay data trafic - especially if being abroad and you need to pay roaming data trafic plus truphone rate (or what ever SP you use) - will it still be cost effective to do VOIP calls over 3G?

[Ennis from Truphone]

@kieran - you're right, however besides just the download and upload speed, 3G also often suffers from huge delays and high chance of dropped connections.

@Michael - the end cost really depends on mobile internet tariffs and varies from country to country. We are looking into providing mobile data bundles with our Truphone Local Anywhere service, this should help significantly when making 3G calls abroad.

Ennis @ Truphone

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