The Future: VoIP on iPhone?

Browsing this article at the NY Times led to a bright “AHA” moment.

Video content on phones was controlled tightly by the cellular providers, much as the “Big 3″ networks controlled television long ago. As technology grows, consumers are able to get their content through new channels.

Jump to Apple’s YouTube-on-iPhone news. The new channel here is the iPhone’s use of WiFi, which broadens the ways users can get video content, even without the cellular network. And now for the AHA moment: it’s not just video… WiFi can do the calls too. What about Skype on an iPhone…

Skype on iPhone?
What about calls? Imagine an iPhone connected to the WiFi at Starbucks, with a VoIP app installed: Presto free minutes! You’d be able to make all the calls you wanted.

Minutes, Shminutes. Rollover, whatever.

Is this the real reason Steve Jobs denied 3rd party apps on the iPhone? It’s not about security (as Jobs claimed), it’s about protecting its honeymoon with AT&T, so that someone didn’t port Skype for iPhone by D-Day Plus 1, starting AT&T on the road to irrelevancy immediately. Could you make a Safari widget that accesses the microphone and speaker on the phone? I bet you can’t. (Either way I’d like to know).

Sure VoIP on a cell would suffer typical issues like delay, but in the near future, any such delay (latency) is only likely to decrease as the internet pipes get better, and VoIP may some day approach “close enough” to landline latency… and the real competition here,cellular phone quality, has a poor reputation for audio quality anyways.

The Future
Now my brain reels as it wanders: With all those “Starbucks-office” types, will a coffee company raise prices and eat into AT&T’s minutes-revenue? Or what if you live in San Francisco, where Google is offering free wifi?

The equation would be free wifi = free cellular service. (Well, $30/yr for VoIP-to-phone service from Skype).

For the average person, free wifi would be had at the home LAN, the office LAN (if the IT guy doesn’t block the ports), and… well imagine something like a Clearwire broadband modem for your automobile. Then, cellular phone service would be reduced to… well… rural calls, so maybe they would charge for handover as you traveled from the area served by one cell to another.

OK I probably have some of my facts wrong here. Maybe I’m missing something. Whatever it is, you can bet the suits and engineers at Apple have thought about it. Heck VoIP hasn’t killed traditional landline long distance yet, although it will some day.

But to go out on a limb… Third party apps will probably be locked for at least 2 years in N. America. Then Apple might divorce AT&T (as it did Verizon with its ROKR), and enable at least some 3rd party apps, most notably Skype, with some strategy VoIP via WiFi or some other broadband that bypasses the cellular networks.

---

UPDATE: T-Mobile USA launches WiFi calls for cells:
Coincidence? Nothing is coincidence this week before the iPhone release. I just read on iTWire that T-Mobile is now offering WiFi calls on cells. At $10/mo for a single line, it’s still much more expensive than Skype’s $30/yr, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Look for iPhone to make a deal with Skype after 2 years; if it happens earlier, I’d still be thrilled, although AT&T probably wouldn’t be– and I’m sure they’ve already talked about the issue in their partnership agreement.

UPDATE 2:

Thinking about this more, a proprietary VoIP (like Skype) isn’t what Apple would do. The open Jabber format would work, and who’s one of the biggest player in Jabber? One of Apple’s new partners in the iPhone, that’s who: Google and their Google Talk.

This entry was posted on June 24, 2007 at 10:57 pm and is filed under iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.