VoIP News & Information

OpenPeak is trying to spruce up the bland world of home or VOIP phones with its OpenFrame phone range. The company announced that its OpenFrame IP Media Phone is now ready for production. Service providers are expected to begin supporting the phone in Q1 2009.

It is certainly not a generic home phone as it deploys the Intel Atom processor. The touchscreen phone will provide a rich media experience along with voice and data services. OpenPeak believes that the phone will present new revenue opportunities to VOIP service providers. We will have to wait for a while to learn about its fate.

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The past hundred or so years brought us the telegraph, the telephone and radio communication. But it was back in the past 25 or so years when someone got the bright idea of combining the radio and telephone technologies. That gave us the cellphone, which is fast becoming the most popular personal communications device of the 21st century.

And, of course, there’s the Internet. The cellphone and the Internet make up a major portion of the personal-communications pie today.

Now it seems the next big thing is coming up with ways to combine the cellphone and the Internet. After all, look what happened when we combined radio and the telephone. So now we’re seeing some interesting results.

Voice-over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is one example of how we can speak over the Internet rather than just type something. Services like Skype and Vonage are continuing to grow rapidly.

Phone customers who make calls through the Internet in Kansas may see higher bills come January.

On Monday, the Kansas Corporation Commission issued an order requiring voice-over-Internet-protocol services — also known as VoIP — to kick into a state fund that assures phone service is available to everyone, especially hard-to-serve rural areas.

Customers of regular phone companies have paid the Kansas universal service charge for years, but Internet phone providers haven’t until now.

The commission order requires VoIP companies to pay 4.65 percent of their Kansas revenue to the fund –the same as traditional phone companies pay.

The VoIP companies can absorb the cost or pass it on to customers in a bill charge, said commission spokeswoman Rosemary Foreman.

Because VoIP companies operate outside state regulation, no one knows how many Kansas customers they have, said Sandy Reams, managing auditor for the commission.

She estimated that VoIP companies make about $35 million a year in Kansas. She estimated their universal service payments will be about $1.6 million.

Making the VoIP companies pay is a matter of fairness, said Rep. Don Myers, R-Derby, a member of the Energy and Utilities Committee.

Myers supported recent legislation authorizing the commission to begin charging VoIP providers for the universal service fund.

VoIP service is a fairly new development that has grown along with the rollout of high-speed Internet.

VoIP transmits phone conversations through the Internet to phone company networks, allowing calls to reach users of ordinary phones.

Although the traffic originates through the Internet, “certainly they are using the phone system,” Myers said.

Vonage has emerged as the most visible VoIP company through its TV ad blitzes. But a variety of other well-known companies are active in the industry, including Microsoft, T-Mobile, Google and Yahoo.

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VoIP has been ushered onto the iPhone in quite a few incarnations, but we’d wager than none of ‘em are as useful as iCall. Said application is currently in beta form, though a release isn’t quite ready for the public at large. Put simply, it enables iPhones to switch from GSM to WiFi (when WiFi is nearby, of course) on-the-fly in order to save cell minutes and bypass the hassle of manually changing over. Interested? We thought you’d be — hop on past the break to see a demonstrative video of the app in action, and keep a close eye on the read link for a sure-to-surface-soon download.

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We knew it would happen eventually, but we figured it would take longer than a week.

Just days after American Airlines made the big-deal announcement that it had rolled out in-flight internet on certain routes, hackers have found a way to use the service for voice-over-internet protocol calls, despite promises from the airline that its air-to-ground system, developed by Aircell, would block voice calls.

A tip before we go any further: Voice calls on airplanes will result in chatty passengers who yap their way through an entire six-hour flight, which is likely to increase the chance of an air-rage incident. Fly at your own risk.

The workaround, called Phweet, allows users to call friends who are linked via Twitter. Andy Abramson from VoIP Watch says that he recently used Phweet to chat with a friend on an American Airlines flight, and that the conversation was so clear he could hear the flight attendant ordering people to get back to their seats in preparation for landing.

1. Go to the Phweet homepage and log on with your Twitter name and password.
2. Add the Twitter user name of person you want to connect with, along with a message telling them want to talk. A Twitter update and Phweet URL is sent.
3. When your friend clicks on the Phweet URL and accepts, your browser whistles and a Flash widget appears. Click on it to talk.

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Nokia Nseries is committed VoIP services as part of its offering. That is why we have included SIP stack and improved the developer VoIP offering in S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 by enhancing the VoIP APIs to improve the call quality, as an example.

A Nokia VoIP client is not included with the Nokia N78 and the Nokia N96 and VoIP solutions based on this particular client such as Gizmo will not work. However, Forum Nokia will cooperate with third-party developers to support them in porting their applications from S60 3.0/3.1 releases to S60 3.2. One example is Fring, whose popular application will be offered via Nokia’s Download! service for the Nokia N96.

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