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T-Mobile UK Blocking Mobile VoIP Start-Up
wjamesau writes "The war between telecoms and VOIP heats up: according to Om Malik, T-Mobile UK is refusing to interconnect with mobile VoIP provider Truphone, a UK start-up with a mobile VoIP client that enables calls cheaper than mobile. 'T-Mobile told Truphone, that as a result of a policy decision, they don't connect to VoIP-based low cost calling services. T-Mobile UK's decision to block Truphone might have come as a response to the new and radically better Truphone 3.0 client that allows you to send Free SMS messages and allows VoIP calls over 3G. According to M:Metrics, nearly 86% of UK mobile users are heavy SMS users, and that means it is a cash cow that carriers like T-Mobile can't afford to be slaughtered by IP-based SMS services.' Can mobile companies successfully crush VOIP competitors like this?"
Question: Can mobile companies successfully crush VOIP competitors like this?
Answer: Yes
Question: Can mobile companies successfully crush VOIP competitors like this LEGALLY?
Answer: The courts can decied
- or -
The customers and decide.... (for or against!)
Depends, are they stuck with a monopoly to get service? If so, they dont have much choice.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Fuck yeah! SMS and Voice over IP! Keep it up Truphone. No more 10 cents for a single 100 byte message!
Fuck the monopolistic telcos in the arse.
The big giants will keep trying to crush the little guy all the way to the bank, until a judge finally realizes what's happening, and how the consumers are all getting stifled.
In other words, it'll keep happening until a judge pours a big jug of frosty piss on the big monopolistic company.
The mobile operators are already in the EU's cross hairs and they've been forced this year to essentially remove the roaming charges for calls between EU states. The commission also indicated that that was just the first step of bringing the mobile operators under control as they are today running wild and ripping off their customers.
Personally, I hope they come down on them like a ton of bricks as they really are ripping of their customers. For instance locally, here in Sweden I pay an acceptable 20/month for limitless 3G data traffic. If I take my phone to Belgium, my gangster of a mobile operator charges 10 per MB. It's quite absurd what they have been getting away with so far.
charging to txt and having 3G simultaneously makes no sense.. it just is a matter of time until everyone tunnels through the net if they dont make txting free or a token amount. W/ any sort of idle/push based email, it makes more sense to tunnel your txt messages via your email client (to other peoples cell phone numbers via the gateways) than to pay the ludicrious per message rates. W/ cingular/att unlimited data is $20 and unlimited txting is $20, so its better to pay $20 once and tunnel. This has the added advantage of logging your txt messages in your imap folder.
I'm not familiar with the UK's anti-trust laws but I doubt if this is going to fly. The only reason T-Mobile has any interest in blocking them is to prevent them from gaining a market share. I'm wondering if any of T-Mobile stated their reasons for this 'policy decision' because I'd be impressed if they could fabricate anything that made sense and wasn't anti-competitive.
Recently, T-Mobile changed their data settings and basically made it worthless. I'm thinking that this was why. They didn't want VOIP going out over their wireless, and they killed the entire wireless data network to do it. I had only recently signed up for it, so I don't miss it much, but it's got my thinking about another provider if they are going to treat their customers like criminals.
Of course, maybe unlimited data connection for $5/mo was too cheap. If they can't actually support that, they should charge more instead of destroying their service.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
TMobile doesn't have a monopoly. So you don't like their business practices, but it's their network, and there are alturnatives.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
VOIP technology isn't that good a match for 3G - the latency is fairly high and jittery, due to the way cellular data is handled, so the Push-To-Talk stuff works fine but live VOIP has some quality issues. On the other hand, the phone has voice compression/decompression hardware built in, and plenty of bandwidth, so if it'll let the user's programs get to it, it's a natural thing to implement, and it's possible to use decent encryption instead of the joke encryption that GSM comes with. (Except for key exchange, crypto doesn't take much CPU resource at compressed-voice speeds, so it's not an extra performance hit.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They've stated that they believe voip is a threat to land lines, not mobiles.
BTW they're the cheapest in the UK for data. £7.50 buys you a gig of date to use within the month. Compare that with Orange, who'll charge you £8 for something crap like 30 or 40 megs. The £7.50 deal excludes VOIP and, bizarrely, instant messaging - I guess they want you to stick with their 10p texts which, despite being the same price as most other networks, are hideously overpriced from a byte-per-pound point of view. Fortunately they don't seem to be enforcing that rule though. They have other packages if you want to use voip and instant messaging.
Has anyone mentioned Fring.com yet? I use it to Google-chat (ie IM) with people, and it supports MSN and some other systems I've never heard of.
In the United States, there are only four major cellular phone providers. There are alternatives, but most of them are off-shoots of the already well established Big Four.
That's what I meant.
As long as you keep paying them, yes they can crush voip services to dust.
It's their network. They own it, and therefor they can control it.
As a user of their network you are subject to their rules.
They only way to stop them is by government regulation which can mandate network neutrality.
Because the only rules they are subject to are those of the law.
This is just another reason for network neutrality to be made law.
If you have it, use your right to vote to make changes in your governments.
T-Mobile ironically are the least restrictive when it comes to use VOIP over the data service. It's "discouraged" but not barred. Vodafone on the other hand bar it - even if they don't have a mechanism in place actually to detect it : http://leavingthedayjob.blogspot.com/2007/06/does- anyone-at-vodafone-understand.html
With cell carriers doing stuff like this, I wonder if an analog SMS system would be practical. Data are sonically encoded as they are with a modem. Since cellphone noise levels are generally higher than landline noise levels, I suppose a slower (but more reliable) transmission system would be necessary. Chorded tones à la existing touchtone systems could work, or perhaps series of pulses (à la Morse code). Although an analog SMS system would use cellular minutes, it's far cheaper to make a 5-10 second phone call than it is to send a text message.
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
In the UK we manage 5 mobile networks. And yet we still have some of the highest mobile termination rates in the world. I can make cheaper calls to the other side of the world than I can to a friend's mobile in the same town as me.
Please think of the CEOs! They have to put bread and water on their plates too :~(
I was right there with you until
But big companies have convinced the world that patents are evil; and thus their effectiveness are being destroyed through FUD.Big companies love patents. They only dislike certain patents that make it difficult to sell a product or limit their ability to enter/influence/control a market.
Patents are just tools. The true measure is how the tools are used and/or abused. And these days, patents are useful to big companies plenty. Just look at MS and the whole Linux licensing thing.
So, in the current patent climate, the little guys would actually thrive if patents were repealed. This, to me, is why much of the debate about patents misses the mark. Even though in principle the patent system encourages innovation, in practice every system you create is yet another system that the rich (or the "currently entrenched," if you prefer) will use to prevent the poor (or the "newcomers" if you prefer) from gaining power (or money). Which is why, despite all the good that the patent system does, I believe we are reaching the point where it is inhibiting more innovation than it is encouraging.
Please think of the CEOs! They have to put Kobe Beef and Chteau La Mondotte Saint-Emilion 1996 on their plates too :~(
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
Youre almost certainly right that the UK courts wont allow these actions by T-Mobile. But the REAL question here is whether these actions can crush this (probably poorly funded) upstart BEFORE the slow-turning wheels of government and justice get a chance to stop them? Im betting on no-- The government will say "oh gee that was illegal" and slap them with a nominal fine, but by then it wont matter anymore. Or maybe im just a cynic.
There are 5 network operators and 5 virtual network operators on top of that.
Deleted
It's one of my pet hates when "as a result of a policy decision X cannot do Y". And I've encountered it where the 'policy' was 'written(?) by the very person telling you.....
A number of times I've asked 'where is this policy written?', or 'does the person/committee that wrote the policy have the ability to make an exception?'....
Saying "as a result of a policy decision" is a cop-out. In this instance they should say "We don't want to lose our market share or go out of business by opening up to competition"
Depends on whether you make them from another mobile. Calls from my mobile to another UK phone cost the same amount, whether it is too a mobile or a landline. I ditched the landline a year or so ago, because it wasn't cost-effective, and use VoIP from my computer for international calls.
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With the advent of GPRS, there was a data channel that could be used instead. In Japan, SMS is effectively dead, and everyone just sends emails from their phones for exactly this reason; that it's so much cheaper than SMS. When GPRS was originally launched, a few providers let you send SMS over GPRS and be charged GPRS rates, but I haven't seen that for a while.
When it comes to latency, 3G isn't that bad. While GPRS was often over a second, UTMS gives latencies of 200ms or so for me. I've had VoIP conversations with people in the USA with that kind of latency without problems.
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And then take it away from them if the don't immediately drop all blocking! Nothing less will do.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Well the other way of looking at that is to say that your mobile price plan makes local calls as expensive as calls to a mobile ...
shakes magic 8-ball
Signs point to yes
What's up with these cheesy-ass questions at the end of summaries? Of course the /. crowd will be up in arms against it!
Then your £7.50 buys you a gig of data to use only as they see fit!
Data bits are simply 1's and 0's. They should be in charge of moving that data, and not deciding good data from bad data.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
> Then your £7.50 buys you a gig of data to use only as they see fit!
> Data bits are simply 1's and 0's. They should be in charge of moving that data, and not deciding good data from bad data.
They should be allowed to do whatever is morally acceptable. They have a duty to their shareholders or owners to make as much money as possible. As informed consumers we are free to form contracts with whoever offers us a product/service we desire at a price and with conditions we find acceptable. I find TMobile's contract satisfactory, and so I remain with them.
You're free to offer a rival service, but good luck providing people with a way of undercutting your pricing policy. The argument reminds me of people who complain that wine is too expensive in restaurants. If the price of wine was reduced to only a couple of pounds above what it costs in the shops then obviously the restaurant is going to either have to increase the price of the food, or make less money.
When the roaming charges payed on top of your normal charges are more than the network you are roaming on charges thier customers for the complete service something is wrong!
trouble is the only alternatives for users is to use some kind of intermediatory (either run by them or run by a third party) to route calls to many different numbers and carry arround a SIM card for every country they visit. Worse in some european countries apparently you need to be a local resident to buy a local SIM card legally.
NONE of the providers make thier roaming charges easy to find out, sure its probablly burried on thier websites somewhere but its going to stop the majority of people finding out until its too late and thats all thats needed to maintain the status quo.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You are incorrect about the origins and purpose of SMS. The ss7 spec has always included space for short messages. It is a well thought out implementation that is now massively used throughout the world by just about every carrier in one way or another.
See http://www.pt.com/tutorials/ss7/index.html for a good breakdown.
Tmobile also refuses to deactivate text messages for any reason. I receive a few unwanted text messages every month and never use text messages myself. They are only about ten cents each, but the fact that Tmobile refuses to turn off text messaging is annoying, but makes perfect sense.
Nickel and dime has a new meaning when you multiply that small fee times the number of subscribers they have globally. I know it is technologically possible, but they pretend that it isn't. Cingular was able to turn off text messages on my last plan.
Now if all 5 operators agree to not connect to Truphone, then you have an effective monopoly. If only T-Moblie refuses, then you have 2 carriers with partial service. T-mobile and Truphone. Now if Truphone does something terribly clever, like marketing heavily to teens (who only need to be able to call their parents and other teens) then T-mobile is the one losing face. T-mobile can't do that because their customer base is already too large. Kids getting their first mobile can be made to see T-mobile phones as the ones that "don't work" and their parents will go along with the Truphone trendyness because of a lower price on the phone bill. Remember T-mobile is only about 10 years old, they could vanish from the scene as quickly as they arrived.
We are all just people.
What if the company in question responds by offering emergency services agencies low bids on their phone systems. Remember they're the government, they have to take the low bid. Then all they have to do is wait for someone to be unable to call the fire department and watch T-Mobile get eaten alive by the lawsuit(s).
I did say it was evil.
If they had their own network, they wouldn't need to use TMobiles, one would assume.
Or are you saying they should build out their own infrastructure and sell phone this service that way? Of course, I'm sure they would have to raise their rates in order to pay for the infrastructure they had to build to offer their product.
This sounds so familiar.. I'm sure I have heard this same business model before. Oh right.. Vonage..
I agree, and I'd like to think that this is a well-supported principle, but the recent AT&T announcement seems to suggest otherwise. It's for different reasons, but at the base level, they're not that different.
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"The war between telecoms and VOIP heats up: according to Om Malik"
I don't known if anyone pointed it out but VoIP is telecoms. Voice is what telecoms still continue to make their real profit from. VoIP is the standard for all NGN Telecom and network providers. The 3GPP Group defines Ethernet IP infrastructure as the long term next generation plan. Providers will support multi-play services over IPv6 networks. So businesses like T-Mobile will run all of their services over IP.
It almost makes me laugh that people don't realise how prevalent IP based networks are in their day to day lives! Can mobile companies successfully crush VOIP competitors like this?
They don't need to; they will progress forward in leased line connectivity to enable IP capable VoIP exchanges for business customers and resellers.
If they continue to dominate the radio spectrum within the UK they can still keep up with VoIP providers. Even if an 802.whichever specification is released for use such as WiMax, coverage and quality will be poor compared to 2G's widespread coverage and high quality in comparison to latency and jitter sensitive IP based traffic.
The advent of HSDPA/HSUPDA networks within the UK brings hope for wireless users who wish to use VoIP applications and services. But weather the multi-service proxies and content gateways will allow this traffic without bypassing to a chargeable package (APN) is questionable.
Eventually consumer customers will be able to run SIP and third party 'VoIP' apps over UK mobile operators, but not for a few more years at least.
With business and corporate companies operating their own PBX's or even acting as MVNO's (Basic but you get the idea.) Consumers can eventually also be billed selectively for service and application usage. This can tied into LBS and setups which can bill selectively down to minute details.VoIP is the future for voice infrastructure across the world and as with voice now there will be varying providers, who operate within various markets. NGN's are defining our lives via the conglomerates we buy from, you best get ready to accept your life is going to exist over IP.
Oh and FYI bombastinator (812664) emergency services have specific radio based methods of having consistent high quality services. This is in fact defined world wide by GSM and 3GPP etc.
This is interesting, because I just bought a T-Mobile contract phone. The retail grunt told me in no uncertain terms, in reference to the Web'n'Walk package, "You can use VoIP over it." Maybe he meant, "You can try and use VoIP over it."
This doesn't particularly bother me, I've got more free minutes/texts than I'm ever going to use, and I'm not in a 3G coverage area anyway. I just don't like being lied to.
Oh, and there's an inaccuracy in the article:
This was true up until two weeks ago, when they returned to an agnostic approach. In the process, they broke services for existing customers (such as my company) because they now use lossy compression on some of their connections. It's possible that we might actually move our services over to T-Mobile because their connections are usually more reliable.
The UK mobile phone companies (like many around the world, no doubt) face a dilemma - they offer phone technology that supports VoIP services but some (Vodafone with the Nokia N95) disable to VoIP bits, yet some (BT) offer their own combined 3G/GSM/VoIP services (BT Fusion).
My company has 14 phones on contract with Vodafone and the phones run Windows Mobile 5, so support a VoIP application - I have tried this and it works fine, but the data charging structure makes its use expensive. Vodafone offer us free 3G/GSM calls between our mobile phones and also to 10 designated landline numbers - two of which connect to our Asterisk server so we can dial in free and then use DISA to get a dial tone and dial any landline number we want - in effect giving us national and international calls at the rates charged by our VoIP service provider. Vodafone know we have connected to an Asterisk server and have not passed any comments about it, but being the cynic I could imagine that sometime the terms for their '10 free numbers' could easily be adjusted to exclude numbers that terminate at VoIP service providers.
From my perspective, the much-maligned BT have understood that they are a carrier for comms and no longer a 'telephone service provider' so they have made it possible to support (and charge for) any comms done by their customers, rgardless of protocol and type (voice and data).
Banning the use of SIP/VoIP from mobiles will hopefully fizzle out as customers realise that they can port to 'another provider' who has taken the bold step of offering a contract that keeps the customer happy and makes the company money regardless of what their phones are used for.
AT&ROFLMAO
Other VOIP service providers do not have the problems that Truphone have. I regularly use WiFiMobile and Fring on different networks without problems. The real problem is that Truphone expect the operators to ship their phones with the Truphone software so that their customers can use the Truphone network. This is entirely unreasonable and will never happen. It would be like saying Sky have to ship their set-top boxes pre-configured for the Virgin Media network. Presumably the other VOIP service providers are selling a product and not hoping that the mobile operators will supply it for free as Truphone are.
What ever happened to competition in a free market place. You know, the place where us consumers are supposed to benefit from. Unlike those inefficent state run monopolies of yore. Oh wait, they didn't really mean it.
davecb5620@gmail.com
"This sort of behaviour is precisely what the patent system is meant to stop; if what the small company is doing is innovative it give them a gov't monopoly for upto 20 years to get big enough to stop the big company from crushing it"
Patents are designed to deny smaller companies entry to the market. Else why would a whole industry grow up around submarine patents.
"But big companies have convinced the world that patents are evil"
Are you living in some alternate mirror universe.
was: Re:Answer Yes, sort of
davecb5620@gmail.com
Now whilst I agree T-Mobile is the sporn of satan of carriers, surely all mobile carriers will be blocking VOIP?
I mean if your main income is from charging 10p for sending a few bytes of SMS, or a Pound per minute for international mobile calls and someone comes along with a system that will do it for free and all you get is a few pence from a 3G data call, aren't you going to be pissed?
The mobile phone industry is the biggest rip-off racket since Microsoft selling protection from Linux patents.
#include <sig.h>
How do you manage data without a landline? I thought that to get data in the UK, you needed to have a telephone line for ADSL. I have used Skype over 3G, but have to be very careful of my monthly usage.
See my journal, I write things there
I don't know how much experience you have had of quasi-realtime over 3G (using 1.8MBb/s HDSP). It can be jittery as you say, but skype quality is usually quite acceptable.
See my journal, I write things there
T-Mobile offer 2 different UNLIMITED 3G data plans (http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/mobile-phones/int
£29.99 inc VAT = without VOIP
£44.00 inc VAT = with VOIP
By comparison, Vodaphone's cheapest unlimited 3G data plan costs £62 inc VAT.
O2 also charge £62 inc VAT.
Due to laughably poor website design, I am unable to quickly retrieve Orange's charge but I recall them, too, being considerably more than T-Mobile.
This suggests to me that T-Mobile's £30 "unlimited" plan has been set at a very competitive level on the presumption that they will also make a certain amount of money on calls being routed through them. I would also suggest that a VOIP user will burn through considerably more bandwidth than the average 3G data user, allowing them to charge less to people they know won't be VOIPing.
It's worth noting that the comments below the linked-to article reveal that Truphone also has problems running on Vodafone and Orange networks.
Anyway, at this point, I want 3G access to my laptop and £30 is about right, if I was a heavy user of VOIP I might consider the extra £14
You need a telephone line for ADSL, but not for cable. We have an Internet connection from Virgin Media (formerly NTL). They offer bundles with telephones and TV, but since we didn't use either of those, we eventually moved to their Internet-only service. Interestingly, it's the only way that cable is still competitive with ADSL. ADSL + telephone costs less than cable internet + telephone, but cable alone costs less than ADSL + telephone, and you can't get ADSL without a telephone.
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We've managed this for our contract phones, but as I understand it there's still an issue with pre-pay phones. I will confess that I don't know the full details, I'm just a lowly grunt myself.
Interesting. I was staying in the UK for 4 nights a week max but didn't want to enable the phone line + data because of minimum contract lengths. I would guess that cable would have given me a similar issue. It tuned out to be a good idea because the project was canned after three months and I moved country. Unfortunately although rental property sometimes comes with a phone line, it is still quite rare in the UK to find an internet connection. I guess that will change though.
See my journal, I write things there
If you're in the same situation again, NTL (now Virgin) had special deals for students which gave them a shorter minimum contract. Since most students are only in their rented houses for 9-10 months of the year, they allow them shorter contracts. If you told them up-front that you were likely to only be in the country for a few months, then they are likely to offer you a similar deal, rather than have you not buy anything from them.
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See my small cartoon: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2007/06 /the_dinosaur_pr.html
Bye,
Oliver