VoIP to GSM gateway can save you a bundle

THIS YEAR will probably go down in history as "the year Voice over IP hit the mainstream".

Everyone and his mother - at least those who had a booth at Expocomm 2005 Argentina - were selling some sort of kit that did voice over IP.

Last year, the guys at RedVoiss attracted a crowd with their offering. But this year - while they were present once again, basically with the same - their magic was diluted by the presence of ... almost everyone else.

Ateus VoiceBlue VOIP to GSM gateway, with the four slots to insert GSM SIM cards

The most revolutionary product among the VOIP offerings was imho the "Ateus VoiceBlue", a "VOIP to GSM Gateway". The approach is pure genius: traditional VOIP gateways hook up to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) land lines. But what if a call from company branch "x" arriving from the VOIP cloud must end in a GSM mobile phone? Traditionally, the call is then routed using a VOIP-to-POTS gateway to the cellular phone network... at an additional fixed-to-mobile call rate charged by the PSTN operator!. This isn't nice. So what the guys at 2N Telekomunikace (a Czech company) did was pure genius... they developed a VOIP to analogue gateway that instead of offering a RJ11 to be plugged to a fixed phone line, is hooked to a GSM phone interface.

Thus, you insert a GSM SIM card (and not only one but up to four) and there you have... calls coming from the VOIP cloud that can then be routed to GSM mobile destination numbers using the device's own SIM card as the call source. So, as far as the telco is concerned, it's a GSM-to-GSM call they're billing you, much cheaper -specially if you've got several phones for sales teams, technicians on the field, etc than routing it through a land-line gateway, which means you'd have to pay extra fixed-to-mobile call charges.

The gateway works using standard SIP VOIP protocol on the ethernet side, and 800/900/1800/1900 Mhz GSM on the mobile side. Plus, all GSM SIM cards you insert act as 4 independent mobile phones to the cellular provider, all sharing the gateway's single antenna. Kudos to the folks of PointHorizon for showing this kit to me in detail. When I asked about the cost, they quoted me "around 1,500 EUR". I realize that a business can recover the cost of the device very quickly given that land line-to-mobile calls down here are very expensive.

Linksys booth featured VOIP prominently

On the less revolutionary front, Linksys showed VoIP enabled routers at their booth and made "voice over IP" its main booth attraction. On the low-end kit range there was Soyo Group, which presented a whole range of VoIP stand-alone phones, SIP and H.323 VOIP gateways. Mega-distributor Solution Box on the other hand promoted lots of VOIP kit, and someone from Zoom Inc. USA was brought down here to explain and promote the company's "ZoomTel" product line -broadband routers featuring a VoIP voice port, plus the usual router, gateway, firewall, and four port Ethernet switch-. There were dozens of other sellers who also had some kind of VoIP kit or another on display, I'm just mentioning the ones that caught my eye.

Soyo VOIP phones

A techie from Zoom Inc. USA (left) brought to explain the company's ZoomTel kit

Moving a bit higher on the VOIP ecosystem, there were new players like local ISP group Prima, which promoted their new VOIP service for home and business -with similar characteristics to what Vonage offers in the US - under the "Vontel" brand name. Local fiber optic network provider IPlan also appeared in Linksys leaflets touting a new VoIP service dubbed "Proximo" which promises a "70% savings" rate compared to using the incumbent telecoms' services.

On the "high-end" market, the 3com booth also featured enterprise level VoIP kit prominently, but that kit is expensive so honestly the geek in me didn't pay much attention.

ISP group Prima with their new VOIP service: Vontel

3com booth showcasing enterprise level VOIP gear.
Sell your incumbent telecoms' shares, now. They're dancing on the Titanic.

In short, my advice would be don't hold stock of the two local incumbent telecoms for too long, if you have any. With all this flurry of VoIP activity at this year's exhibition, it's only a matter of time before the "cream of the crop" voice users -the corporations and even small business- start implementing voice over IP. It's inevitable then that the incumbents will see a decline in their income due to all the traffic suddenly lost to IP links. µ