Vyke's mobile VoIP falls into N95 trap - voipstage.com - Online guide to VoIP world, news, software, solutions and VoIP providers

Vyke's mobile VoIP falls into N95 trap 06-25-2007
YET ANOTHER provider is offering a VoIP/internet telephony service for mobile phone users. But Vyke Communications has fallen into the same Nokia N95 trap as Truphone.

Vyke's software takes advantage of the 'Internet telephony' application created by Nokia itself. The snag in the UK is that both Orange and Vodafone have asked for this application to be removed from shipping handsets.

So if your N95 handset is supplied by Orange or Vodafone, both Vyke and Truphone won't work for VoIP telephony. There are, however, some facilities offered by Vyke's Vyke Pro software that will still work.

These involve sending messages and texts which would be much cheaper than normal when the handset is 'roaming' and when you connect via Wifi rather than GPRS or 3G.

Truphone kicked up a stink recently over mobile network operator, T-Mobile's tactics for combating VoIP services. The company claims T-Mobile is offering unfair termination charges.

These are the fees which networks charge for connecting each other's calls. James Tagg, Truphone's CEO, has complained bitterly about T-Mobile's behaviour.

"T-Mobile will argue that it is not 'blocking' Truphone but is merely negotiating on price. T-Mobile receives 35p per minute from its customers

But it is offering only 0.21p per minute to Truphone even when Truphone's costs are 9p per minute to terminate the call. T-Mobile is [therefore] blocking our numbers unless we accept this loss-making offer." Significantly, T-Mobile has also announced a trial of a VoIP service in USA and Germany. So it'll be interesting to see what happens when it starts competing directly against Truphone.

In the meantime, T-Online Ventures, the venture capital arm of T-Mobile's parent company Deutsche Telekom, has recently invested in VoIP provider – Jajah.

Jajah takes a browser based approach to providing VoIP telephony. So it works on 'crippled' Nokia 95s as it by-passes the Internet telephony module.

Nokia will soon be faced with a dilemma. It offers a service called Nokia software updater. How can it exclude the Internet telephony application from future releases?

If it doesn't Orange and Vodafone customers will be able to get around the present problem.

Significantly, Vyke communications is listed on the British AIM stock exchange and has been attracting attention from some VCs. It came to the exchange via a reverse buy-out of Maskina by a company called Tower.
Source: [The Inquirer]

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