MagicJack Moving To Smartphones

robo45h writes "The late night infomercial VoIP company magicJack is moving into the smartphone space. The competition there is really going to be interesting. We have the likes of Skype and other VoIP companies competing against the wireless carriers still selling over-priced voice calls. It's such a big battle that the recent Verizon / Google Proposal specifically excludes (provides a loophole for) wireless. This has been brewing since cell phones added data capabilities, but it's coming to a head now." Free calls sounds nice, but it's worth noting that not everyone's happy with MagicJack's EULA.

Comments

Re:Good...

[TheRaven64]

Even as a bit carrier, there are two valuable services on top of just carrying bits:

• Quality of service guarantees.
• POTS bridging.

My mobile phone came with a SIP client, and when I am near a WiFi access point I can call any other SIP users for free. Most people don't (yet?) have a SIP address though, so most calls go to my SIP provider who then routes them to a POTS number. This kind of bridging is something that carriers currently offer, but they bundle it with data, so you pay for the call as a single item, rather than for the bandwidth and the bridging as separate items. I'd love to see legislation forcing them to bill the two separately and offer the same rates for the data part irrespective of who you use for termination.

Quality of service is also very important for voice. GSM quality uses about 5MB an hour. The bandwidth requirements are tiny - a minute of a YouTube video will use more than an hour of talking - but latency and (especially) jitter make a big difference to the perceived quality of the call. Giving higher priority to voice traffic (e.g. reserving some fraction of the available bandwidth for each call) is a valuable service above and beyond just shuffling bits.