WiFi / VoIP Wars: Part II

My latest post about the WiFi calls revolution was published in Israel's leading business magazine, TheMarker (Hebrew), and was also syndicated later to Haaretz, one of the leading daily papers here.

This obviously generated a lot of comments from readers on the various sites, and also some from my personal colleagues. So I am going to address a few of those here, but in any case it can clearly be seen that this subject interests a lot of people from across the value chain (including the end consumers...) . Here are the 3 major comments/questions:

1. VoIP subscription - Some noted that calls are not entirely free, since if you want to reach an actual landline/mobile you have to pay to the VoIP provider (Same as with SkypeOut). While that's true for now, think about what happens when most people have a WiFi-enabled phone: We will all be available at least some of the time with our VoIP presence, so everyone can call their friends inside the VoIP network without needing the operators' network (or the PSTN). In that "world" the balance between pure VoIP calls, mixed VoIP/mobile and pure mobile depends on the areas WiFi covers.

2. Quality of service - Some people who use Fring/Truphone said that the current quality of service can be low and they experienced all of the problems new voice services have: poor voice quality, hangups etc. So most still prefer to use regular mobile calls, even if they are more expensive. It's good to get this feedback, however they also agreed that in the long term probably these problems will go away, in the same way we saw Skype improving.

3. WiMAX - Some people asked why I didn't address WiMAX. First off, it should be clear that WiMAX is also a major threat (or opportunity...) to the operators, and in fact it's an extension to the same threat WiFi poses. Anyway, I preferred to focus on WiFi since devices are already in consumers' hands with the relevant software deployed and the infrastructure is here and now. Though several WiMAX networks are already deployed, the full power of WiMAX is still ahead of us (But closer than we think).

That's all for now, I am sure we will hear a lot about this subject. After publishing the post, I also saw that there's quite a "war" in the UK over this issue. Things are about to get interesting...

P.S. - Thanks goes to Guy Grimland who was bugging me for a while to submit an article to TheMarker... Guy is TheMarker's hitech reporter who also covers the Israeli gaming industry and gives it the attention it needs.