Mobile VoIP – bite worse than bark

Posted: April 8th, 2009 | Author: James Barnes | Filed under: blog | Comments Off

Following on from the recent post about Skype and the iPhone, it’s interesting to see Mobile Operator reactions being reported in the mainstream press.

The Times of London notes that O2 will be quite accepting of Mobile VoIP, remembers Truphone but fails, once again, to mention the awesome power of MO-Call.

USA Today reminds us just how The Phone Company really doesn’t care about you (and fails to remember that MO-Call provides low cost calling from over 1500 different mobiles – not just the iPhone).

Reuters announces that the battle for Mobile VoIP access really has commenced. Forward march MO-Call!

Tucked away in The Register, was a link to this story from the German, English-language, news source The Local. Seems the journalist was lucky enough to speak to a T-Mobile spokesperson, one Alexander von Schmettow, about that network’s position on Mobile VoIP. Here’s what Mr. von Schmettow had to say:

“It is clearly stated in our customer contracts that such services may not be used. There are two reasons for this – because the high level of traffic would hinder our network performance, and because if the Skype programme didn’t work properly, customers would make us responsible for it.”

What? T-Mobile’s Third Generation network cannot cope with RTP streaming? Really? And in what universe do customers blame Network Operators for poor application performance?

Laughable as these spurious claims are, Mr. Von Schmettow of T-Mobile goes on to say:

“..those who violate their contracts can expect to have them cancelled. It’s the same with any contract. If you rent a no-pets apartment and expect no one to notice your little dog, you can’t be surprised when your landlord comes knocking.”

So there you have it, as far as T-Mobile is concerned, using Mobile VoIP on their network is like keeping a little dog in your apartment. That’s the finest argument for protectionism that T-Mobile’s spokesperson could come up with…a little dog.

Woof Woof Mr. Von Schmettow.

Skype and the iPhone

Posted: April 8th, 2009 | Author: James Barnes | Filed under: blog | Comments Off

Quite lot of words have been written about Skype’s new iPhone app. As several people have asked me about this, here’s a quick round up of what’s being said:

Michael Arrington accuses Skype of being arrogant (his pot/kettle/blackness interface is nestled in the early comments)

Om Malik gushes

Techdirt tells us it’s not for Canadians – would love to know the real Techdirt on this story.

Whilst over at All About Symbian, in a fantastic post, Steve Lichfield tells it like it is. Why won’t Apple let an app run in the background? Steve will tell you why.

Why hasn’t Morodo made a MO-Call app for the iPhone?

You can’t run an app in the background – unless you jailbreak
You can’t make calls over the native data-bearer (3G) – unless you jailbreak and use VPN

(And Apple really don’t like you jaibreaking any more).

So, how useful is a telephony app for the iPhone that is going to switch off when you receive an incoming call over the GSM network? Well, just read Steve Lichfield’s post if you haven’t already.

Here at Morodo we decided to focus on the main utility that customers are after – making a call – and we created a great set of MO-Call pages for iPhone that enable low-cost international calls – from the browser. As we use GSM as the bearer for our call, call waiting will work as you would expect it to.

Got an iPhone? Give MO-Call a try. Bookmark www.mo-call.com from the Safari browser on your iPhone and you’ll enjoy instant access to great international call rates direct from your dashboard. It even works in Canada…