Posted by Barlow Keener

TMC announced today that WiFiMobile is selling unlocked smartphones in the US market with VoIP software clients included: “WiFiMobile addresses the Wi-Fi starved US smartphone market.”   WiFiMobile has been competing in Europe by providing a VoIP client for the Nokia N95 and Nokia S60.   The VoIP-mobile company competes with Truphone in the UK. Truphone, a VoIP-mobile startup, received considerable press when Vodaphone and Orange were blamed for disabling the Nokia SIP software stack in phones sold through with their service.   WiFiMobile released a smartphone VoIP client that supplies its own SIP software and allows users to make VoIP calls from the N95 even if the phones are purchased through Orange or Vodaphone.  The WiFiMobile site advertises “unlimited” calling to 40 countries using WiFi or 3G from the N-series phones for $15.99 per month.  

A customer could use the WiFiMobile VoIP to make VoIP calls from the home or office and then from their cell phones almost like using a mini-computer.  All calls mobile and non-mobile have the same voicemail and bill.  This is FMC.  But not what the carriers imagined.   Carrier FMC has taken much too long to roll out.  The capability and technology have been around for years.   IMS is making FMC even more a reality but IMS did not stop carriers from offering a single voicemail, bucket of wireline and wireless minutes, on a single bill.   Users should be able to log onto the web and view their wireless voicemail and wireline voicemail in a single GUI. 

VoIP providers may use the ability of WiFi enabled phones to deliver FMC instead.  We should be seeing carriers - as T-Mobile has done - start to match this capability with femtocell technologies and with service packages delivering calls on VoIP.