Accidental homicide: how VoLTE kills old style call accounting

Sending data over a voice call session isn't a new idea, it is how we used to do things before broadband was invented.

Actually anything that marks the death-knell of "premium numbers" and stupidly over-priced foreign calls is a good thing!

It can't be beyond the wit of the telcos to have a reasonable model for data based on some monthly minimum and some reasonable extra for large amounts of data that will keep the lights on. All we need is some honesty in advertising and a regulator willing to beat them until the comply.

Interesting article

So voice calls are (badly) handled with an outdated model for accounting purposes.

In Luxembourg (where I work), I have a company phone with a 15GB data plan. Any call to any Luxembourg number is free. I have the option of declaring a favorite country (fyi : in Luxembourg, border workers are ten times the amount of national workers). Obviously, living in France, I declared that as my favorite country. Calls made to French numbers are thus free as well. I do pay a small amount for international SMS.

Basically, the only thing I see making money for my telco is the monthly allowance (and, at €40, it's not so much compared to what I've seen elsewhere), and the international calls I have to make from time to time (other than France). Oh, and premium numbers, obviously.

Seems it is possible for a telco to make a living without scrounging every last cent from its customers after all.

Details, details

The fundamental economics is governed by supply, demand and cost of provision.

So it doesn't matter whether telcos charge per minute of calling, or per megabyte of data. The net result will be that the market will decide the total amount of revenue per customer and the profit margin available. The specific charging model is just details.

sip already made 3g voice overpriced

My last 3g Android phone was quite capable of making SIP calls at below payg voice rates on my carrier, only the traditional shocking prices of payg data came close to matching the equally abusive price of voice. This is not an exploit and its to late to pretend it can be stopped.

Old style acounting, and old style plans

Who has a mobile phone plan where they actually end up paying for individual calls? Seems most telcos and resellers are selling plans that feature some idiotic number of calls "for free" in the plan and then simply use the call count as a way of pushing you up a tier in the plans if you actually make a lot of calls. Under almost all usual circumstances you never actually pay for metered calls.

Getting rid of premium numbers OTOH would be the proverbial good idea.

POTS still works quite nicely here.

I don't do "cell" calls, unless it's an emergency.

I mean, really, why always the cell? Is the entire public cellular userbase so wrapped up in itself, and afraid that it might might not be important in the great scheme of things, that it absolutely HAS to make itself known, constantly, with useless trivia?

This is not what we invented computers and networking for.

Dynamic IP address?

The IP address is not guaranteed to be consistent so this isn't a silver bullet.

But even when you are no longer making "calls"...

...they'll still want to make you pay Line Rental.

Voice has been data since networks went digital in the 90s, and as long as the carriers control the cell networks and can monitor its protocols they can bill for whatever they want. Re VoLTE it is not rocket science to lock down the smartphone standard dialler to use SIP only towards specific operator IPs / soft switches. This has already been done for 2-3 years with carrier wifi dialling in the US as supported by Sprint and T-Mobile. And I am not aware of anybody who has jailbroken or hacked the dialler for either Android or iPhone as suggested feasible by this article. Such apps would also be immediately rejected from app stores...

Just charge for QoS levels

Why not just offer a dumb pipe and then charge based on QoS tag of the packets going across the network. That way TelCos can still get some cash for voice calls albeit in a round-a-bout fashion by charging for the higher priority. User would be able to pay the tariff for any data the want (So if you absolutely need a file downloaded, you can bump its priority and get better speeds in exchange for a slightly higher bill). Essentially you'd have something like $0.01 per megabyte of low-pri data, $0.015 for high-pri data and $0.02 per high-pri megabyte no matter what is running on top of it.

QoS is the point here -- I have $10 tablet data plan I run my phone off of

The researchers' points were valid, El Reg is an entertainment organization because society doesn't know how to separate out information services and entertainment, and QoS will be what we probably all end up paying for because you can't fake that and it's easy enough to track.

My SIP calls are fine about 60% of the time without any QoS on my Verizon LTE connection in suburban USA. The rest of the time I have to repeat things frequently or ask the other side to repeat themselves. I'm actually thinking about getting a couple of wired SIP phones for the house and office for when I need a reliable voice connection (not as often as you'd imagine, given the prevalence of email, and I work at a University where people absolutely HATE email). I'd be willing to pay slightly more for a more reliable data connection for phone calls (read: better QoS) on a per-minute basis, but I doubt the telco business model will quite work out that way. I'm suspecting something more like $20/mo for voice-quality QoS and they'll never give up trying to keep me -- er, hackers, from abusing it and the call accounting system.

Certainly the above ideas about paying for a higher QoS on a per-unit basis interest me, though! I'd love to see a wireless ISP (see what I did there?) try that.