Generic VoIP toolkit comes to the iPhone Global IP solutions is now punting its VoiceEngine Mobile technology for the iPhone, making it simple to add VoIP to any iPhone application. Developers wanting to add VoIP capabilities to mobile applications - such as adding voice communications to a game - can licence the stack from Global IP Solutions. Apple has been clear …
Does Jobs say these things forgetting in Europe we are leaps and bounds above the US in terms of our mobile technology?
Surely it should be up to teh network the iphone is on rather than Jobs deciding? T-Mobile on the right package allow VOIP so why cant the iphone be used for that.
Kimbie
Well the one area I can see VoIP being really useful is if you can connect to a cheap/free WiFi network while abroad/roaming (for example a friend's home network). Inclusive minutes are all very well, but I bet VoIP is cheaper when you'd otherwise be roaming.
The previous version of the OS (1.1.4) had Fring, which allowed you to use your Skype account for calls. As someone who's telco charges ridiculous money for overseas calls and has clients in numerous countries, Fring saved me a fortune in fees. When travelling, it was as McObvious said - I would hop onto a WiFi network and pay $0.02 per minute instead of $2+ per minute in roaming fees.
Would be nice to see it over the cell network (if, of course, the carriers ever let Apple do it, which is the issue), but not sure if the bandwidth is there for serious use....
(Saint Steve, to piss off the freetards and haters)
"Surely it should be up to teh network the iphone is on rather than Jobs deciding?"
How naive of you to believe there is even the slightest hint of a possibility that any network would allow VoIP on an all-you-can-eat data plan. At the end of the day, Jobs has to be seen firm on this or Apple won't get any deals with the networks, it's that simple.
There are truckloads of open source SIP/RTP stacks out there, there are also some "lesser ubiquitous" protocol stacks which are even better because they will stay under the radar where SIP probably won't (and for this reason I won't mention them by name here).
Anyway, it's not all that difficult to port such stacks to the iPhone, all you need is the iPhone SDK, and if you don't have the expertise inhouse, you can always hire one of the authors of the stack, open source authors are generally open to doing work on their stuff in return for some financial support as obviously they don't get license fees for their open source code.
You don't put your apps into the app store, you declare them inhouse applications, by default you can deploy every inhouse app to 100 iphones, larger companies can get a higher quota but I don't know what's involved. Anyway, this way, I am pretty confident that you can do VoIP over 3G because your app won't be public. If you use a lesser known voip protocol, especially one of those which don't use RTP but embed signaling and payload into a single data stream, then your network operator will never know you're doing voip calls over 3G.
Ideally, you hook all your iPhones via VoIP into your voip pbx and then you can do all your outbound calls via your pbx using the best tariffs you can get. This is of particular value when making long distance or international calls. If you are roaming overseas you probably don't want to use voip over 3G though because I reckon that the data roaming charges will be too expensive to get any net savings on the calls.
Jobs is right in fending off VoIP over 3G. Existing 3G networks need a few 3GPP release iterations before latency drops to levels deemed good enough for VoIP.
Anyhow, be it 3G or WiFi, 3rd-party VoIP apps don't do the Jesusphone justice. If it's more about more than just bragging rights, you'll want a seamlessly integrated VoIP client. Back to you, Steve.
Er, mine's the one with the Nokia N95 -- with integrated VoIP -- in the pocket.
"t-mobile uk do have specific voip permitted "unlimited" data plans."
I thought it was O2 and not T-Mobile carrying the iPhone in the UK? If so, then what does it matter if T-Mobile have such a tariff plan? The only operator in the UK that matters in respect of the iPhone is O2, or not?
Here is what I do: I built myself an open source software based pbx with a gsm pci interface board. The SIM card for the pbx is on a friends & family plan together with my iphone contract. This means I don't get charged for any calls between the pbx and my iphone. Calls coming in on the pbx via my landline or via voip get forwarded over GSM to my iPhone, no charges at all. If I want to make an international call or a long distance call, I call the pbx over GSM and use voip service from there, no charges for the GSM leg, only the voip charges. Still working on an app for the iphone to make dialing seemless. The pbx software also has a whole bunch of features I haven't even looked at yet, but some of it seems very useful.
The pbx cost me about $120, the gsm pci card was expensive though, almost $500, I probably won't save as much as to get that back, but hey, it was great fun to do this and I learned a lot.
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