AllTheTalk.com

On April 2, Air France began offering voice calls on one of its jets on a trial basis, and BMI of Britain and TAP of Portugal plan to do the same.

Although U.S. airlines have shunned the service, Ryanair, Europe’s largest low-cost airline, is so confident mobile phoning will prove popular that it plans to start offering it in June without even bothering with a trial.

With the Air France trial, passengers only learn about the possibility of using their phone once they are on the plane. An announcement refers them to an instruction card in the seat pocket.

They are told to switch off their phones during take-off and landing - and a special icon has been added next to the seatbelt sign to indicate when phones can be turned on.

[…]

The technology being tested by Air France links passenger phones to an onboard network connected to the ground via satellite. OnAir, the supplier, said transmission levels are low enough to avoid affecting the safety of aircraft equipment.

OnAir is an Airbus joint venture based in Geneva and one of two companies that are offering the technology, along with AeroMobile, a British joint venture with the Norwegian telephone company Telenor.

The system being tested by Air France uses an onboard base station in the plane - called a pico cell - which communicates with passengers’ own handsets. Though low power, the pico cell, located in a compartment normally used for hand luggage, creates a network encompassing the cabin of the plane.

The base station routes phone traffic to and from the plane to a satellite which beams down to mobile networks on the ground. Meanwhile the control unit on the plane ensures that mobiles do not connect to any base stations on the ground - as is technically possible when a plane is flying below 10,000 feet.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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Get ready for free VoIP calls on your iPhone. An Israeli company called Fring announced today that it started publicly testing an application for the iPhone called Fring which allows users to make and receive calls using voice over IP technology. In case there’s any sort of misconception here, Fring bypasses any cellphone carrier and relies solely on an Internet connection to make a call.

But here’s the surprise. Fring allows users to make VoIP calls over 3G or EDGE connections, which is a huge deal. With Fring, all customers need would be a data subscription with their carrier (in case of the U.S., AT&T) and begin making those free calls. According to Fring, the application will dynamically adjust audio quality depending on the type of connection it detects.

Source: Tom’s Guide

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Mobiletor brings us a quick narrative of the history of the Mobile Phone.

If you have gotten used to your sleek and compact phone, imagine our grandfathers carrying a huge box which they called as a ‘Cell phone’, which weighed approximately 4 times more as compared to the newer sleek phones. Mobile phones have seen a vast amount of changes in the last few decades.

[…]

The Mobile phones have traveled right from the old green or blue background screens to the latest color widescreens which can be controlled by a mere touch on the screen. While we are getting ready to welcome the 4G generation of mobiles, the mobile phones have already started displaying mobile TV’S proudly and they even guide one through a road with the GPS maps and real time traffic information.

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Cindy Waxer of VoIP news has decoded VoIP Jargon for the benefit of the average human. No longer will you have to nod your head and smile when your IT Guy starts talking in tongues.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

Managed VoIP: With managed VoIP services, a third-party provider offers all of the equipment, software, operations facilities and technical expertise needed for a company to reap the benefits of an IP-enabled phone system without the costs, risks and headaches of an on-premise VoIP solution. Packages typically include the design, integration and deployment of IP telephony equipment and software, along with the management and maintenance of existing telephony solutions and the new VoIP network. To get the most out of a managed VoIP partnership, however, companies must establish a strict service-level agreement with a VoIP provider that guarantees a certain percentage of network uptime.

and

SIP (Session Initiated Protocol): A protocol for Internet telephony, SIP is a service that allows businesses that have a PBX system installed to use real-time communication technologies — including VoIP. By connecting a SIP trunk to a traditional PSTN (public switched telephone network), companies can not only communicate over IP within the enterprise, but also outside the business. What’s more, companies can replace traditional, fixed PSTN lines with PSTN connectivity via a SIP-trunking service, thereby creating a single conduit pipeline for multimedia components, including voice, video and data. As a result, a SIP-trunking service typically delivers greater cost savings and increased reliability as guaranteed by today’s SIP-trunk providers.

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Erica DeWolf of DeWolf eMarketing & Design put together an interesting report about statistics surrounding mobile ads. In it, she writes:

According to a March 2008 Nielsen Company study, Nielsen’s Mobile Advertising Report, 58 million mobile phone users have been exposed to advertising on their phones in the past 30 days. That’s 23% of all United States mobile subscribers. Over half, or 28 million of these subscribers have responded to the mobile ad they were exposed to.

[…]

Mobile Ad Acceptance

• 51% of those who received mobile ads responded.
  • 26% responded by sending an SMS text-message
  • 9% responded by using “click-to-call”
• 32% of mobile phone users would be open to mobile advertising if it would lower their monthly cell phone bill.
• 14% say they care currently open to mobile advertising so long as the ads are relevant to their interests.
• 23% say they expect to see more mobile ads in the future.
• Only 10% of mobile phone users said mobile ads are acceptable, although an increasing number of individuals seem to be understanding the value proposition that will soon be associated with mobile advertising.

Some of the stats are a little surprising, but the overall message is that mobile advertising is becoming more and more acceptable in the marketplace, as long as the ads relevant or provide a tangible benefit to the recipient.

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NetworkWorld has an interesting story about a medical health center that is still taking baby steps toward VoIP and converged networking.

Baptist Health says a measured transition to VoIP makes the most sense for it, and there are lessons to be learned from its approach.

Most of Baptist Health’s 8,000 phones are located in a 15-floor building in Little Rock, but the medical center has eight sites overall. As it moves offices or builds new facilities, it will outfit those desktops with IP phones, Myers says.

“We never made a decision to forklift everything out and replace it with IP, but as departments moved or are added or if we buy up a clinic across town – if we feel it’s a good candidate for IP that’s what we do,” he says.

The success of a VoIP implementation – even the decision whether to implement VoIP – is customer or vertical market-specific in the end.

Whether you are in the market for a complete overhaul of your VoIP systems, or you want to transition slowly, VoIP can be scaled to fit your needs, while also realizing a significant ROI.

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