Intelligent Communications Update
Truphone expands with addition of 260 hotspots
Truphone has announced the addition of 260 hotspots to the expanding estate of locations from where Truphone can be used to make free and low-cost mobile phone calls over Wi-Fi and the Internet. Rick Ehrlinspiel, CEO at Surf and Sip, said: “Truphone and Surf and Sip are giving people what they want: low cost calls, on phones they like, from places they want to be.”
21 million broadband lines in the UK by 2013
The current downward trend in a growth rate of net additions to the number of consumer broadband lines is not just a blip but shows the pattern for the future, predicts analyst company Point Topic.
About 330,000 and 550,000 consumer broadband lines were added in the middle two quarters of 2007 respectively, the lowest numbers since 2003. Almost 600,000 broadband lines (business and consumer) were added which is a better result than projected. Point Topic estimates that by the end of 2012 about 73% of homes and 85% of business premises will have a broadband connection.
Mobile VoIP set to eclipse voice over WiFi & become mainstream
Future generations of wireless technology – 3GPP LTE (Long Term Evolution), 3GPP2 UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband), WiMAX – are `all-IP`, so unless mobile operators continue to run separate voice networks in parallel, they will inevitably transition to VoIP at some point.
Some independent VoIP players are already exploiting the fact that today’s 3G networks can already support VoIP, putting dedicated software on smartphones, exploiting open operating systems, flat-rate data plans and features like “naked SIP” and built-in VoIP capability. Some operators are even offering their own VoIP software for PCs with wireless broadband.