Voice 2.0
Yesterday evening’s Mobile Monday London was all about Voice 2.0. There were speakers from Erlang Consulting, Wireless Foundary and Spinvox. The speaker from Fring couldn’t make it so Christian Lindholm gave his views on Voice 2.0. Jay Fenton from Howler Tech also gave a demo of a mobile-based conferencing system.
Here’s what I took away from the event…
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Markus Taylor from Erlang showed how it’s possible to produce a prototype project (Journey Angel for Transport for London ) based on scripting. They are using something called MRIX that I hadn’t heard of. They are also using XMPP/Jabber for inter-system communication that is an interesting example of using something for which it wasn’t originally designed.
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Simon Crowfoot from SpinVox described how there’s still innovation to be found with voice, in their case using speech to text technology.
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Ian Wood from Wireless Foundry told us how over 50% of calls are now made on mobiles. However, his view is that fixed lines will not disappear and may even make a comeback if fixed line companies can bring new features we now take for granted on mobiles. He also believes there may be innovations related to stereo and active directories.
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Christian Lindholm declared the new 3 Skypephone a revolution since it includes presence and changes the way people are charged for calls. He also thinks the phonebook will be the future battleground.
The Q&A discussion included..
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Are people willing to pay more for better QoS? (or features). With respect to features, it’s often the case they don’t scale (e.g. Orange Wildfire and 2 lines) and have to be withdrawn by the network operator when too many people start using them - even though they were lucrative for the network operator
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Innovation in voice is currently stagnant. There’s no incentive for network operators to change something that’s giving them the bulk of their revenue. Network operator boardrooms don’t talk much about voice.
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Mico/pico cells currently have barriers to uptake due to their apparent (not real) load on the network. In stats, they can appear as a 10 handset load on the network even though they are not being used.
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People are still walking around with ‘old’ low capability phones that slows the uptake of new features.
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