Over-the-Top VoIP Application for Mobile Operators

At Kineto, our goal has always been to give the mobile operator more tools and capabilities for their core services. That was the imperative behind our new Smart VoIP, announced today.

Smart VoIP is the first VoIP application specifically developed to enable mobile operators to leverage their existing network infrastructure to offer a competitive over-the-top (OTT) voice service.

It is intended to be like a downloadable VoIP service, but is tied to the operator’s own baseline voice service. Instead of it being completely independent of the mobile voice, our app integrates with the cellular voice service.

The app supports a range of standard mobile telephony capabilities and is designed to run on major mobile operating systems, including iPhone®, Android® and Windows Mobile®. It can be branded by mobile operators and downloaded to subscribers through standard application stores. Now, a user can dial a number and choose to complete the call over cellular or via the OTT VoIP app (over Wi-Fi or 3G/LTE).

It's a fact that mobile users (so that means pretty much everyone) are using VoIP apps on their smartphones. This results in mobile operators losing minutes.

Rather than missing out on the revenue completely, some service providers see value in developing their own OTT VoIP app that can get these savvy users back on their network. AT&T recently launched "Call International," and O2 in the UK announced they were going to trial a service from their VoIP group Jajah.
The demand is there.

Smart VoIP is one more tool we think operators need to compete.

Read the Smart VoIP press release.
Read the Smart VoIP application web page.  
Read the coverage in PC World.




What do you think?

Not Resting on our Laurels

Second quarter was a strong and positive one for Kineto. We're not resting on our laurels, mind you, but I do want to share them with you.

By the end of Q2 2011, Kineto's Smart Wi-Fi Application was officially on 15 additional Android smartphones. This brings the total number of Smart Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones to more than 30 from the industry's leading manufacturers, including HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola, Samsung and ZTE.

Other highlights:

•  Orange UK has expanded its Signal Boost service (based on Smart Wi-Fi) to offer the following nine smartphones: Samsung Galaxy S II and Galaxy Ace; the LG Optimus Me; HTC Wildfire S, Cha Cha and Desire S; along with the Orange-branded Barcelona, Monte Carlo and Stockholm.

•  T-Mobile USA introduced six new Wi-Fi Calling-enabled smartphones, including the Samsung Dart™, Samsung Gravity™ SMART, Samsung Exhibit™ 4G; HTC Sensation™ 4G, T-Mobile® G2x™ with Google™ and the T-Mobile® Sidekick® 4G, providing customers with enhanced network coverage and the ability to experience high-quality voice and data on their home Wi-Fi networks.

•  ZTE will now pre-load Kineto's Smart Wi-Fi Application onto select new Android-based smartphones.

•  Huawei will now pre-load Kineto's Smart Wi-Fi Application onto select new Android-based smartphones.

Read the full Kineto Q2 milestones press release.

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Smartphone owners are savvy about their Wi-Fi and want more of it

The proof is in the survey of 420 smartphone owners in the US that we commissioned in May 2011 and was conducted by MarketTools® Zoomerang®:

• 74 percent of smartphone users in the United States are interested in a mobile operator-provided service that uses Wi-Fi to provide lower cost calls.
• 72 percent of smartphone users are interested in an application that uses Wi-Fi to improve cellular coverage.
• Nearly nine out of 10 (89%) of respondents have smartphones with Wi-Fi.
• 77 percent have Wi-Fi at home; 54 percent have it at their place of work.
• 62 percent of people who own smartphones with Wi-Fi use the Wi-Fi four or more days each week.
• 30 percent say they use Wi-Fi because it is faster than the cellular network; 19 percent because it is easy to access the internet.
• 30 percent have smartphones with a Google Android operating system (OS); 26 percent use Apple iPhone OS; and 22 percent use a RIM OS.

As we all read about in tech and general publications regularly, smartphones have become the dominant mobile phone technology, and their users have aggressively embraced Wi-Fi for a variety of reasons. This trend appears to be continuing on its upswing with no sign of abatement.

Cost and coverage continue to be key issues plaguing the mobile industry, and solutions that address those issues are of great interest to subscribers. This survey finds that subscribers are truly interested in utilizing Wi-Fi capabilities more and are open to operator-provided services.

There are plenty more stats and information about customers by operator and by smartphone type available at Kineto.com.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you may recall that Kineto commissioned similar 2010 smartphone surveys in the US and UK.

Do these 2011 survey results coincide with what you think is going on in the market? Tell us what you think and what in the comments.

Amplifying Orange UK's Signal Boost

Did you read about the event, Amplify 2011, we hosted in June in London for media and analysts? It was an opportunity for us to talk about Smart Wi-Fi and for Orange UK to talk about it's successful Signal Boost service.

Watch this video from the event:

I've written before about some of the highlights from the presentation by Orange UK's Director of Product Marketing Paul Jevons. Read more about them in my previous post about the event.

Some other highlights from the evening that you can watch and hear for yourself in the video include:

- Kineto showcased some of the nearly 30 Android devices on which our Smart Wi-Fi application is available, including smartphones from Huawei, HTC, Samsung and LG.

- Jevons talks about how "brilliantly simple" Signal Boost is because of the Smart Wi-Fi app

- Jevons talks about Everything Everywhere's plans to "roll that [Signal Boost] out across the T-Mobile base in the UK later this year."

- Orange UK reports "genuine and material improvements" in customer satisfaction and retention

- 80% of customers say it is easy to set up and really easy to use; and more customers say it's becoming an influence in their decision of handsets

Watch the Amplify 2011 video for more. After you see it, come back here and let me know what you think. Did you learn anything new?

Smartphones on a tear

The Q2 2010 numbers are in, and people love smartphones! According to Strategy Analytics, and covered in a piece on RCR Wireless, smartphone shipments jumped 43% year over year. More impressive is that 60m units were shipped in Q2. That works out to nearly 20% of the total number of handset units sold worldwide. Very impressive.

As a result of a recent smartphone survey sponsored by Kineto Wireless, we know that over 80% of all smartphones have Wi-Fi. The next step must be Smart Wi-Fi.

Give us our Wi-Fi! US & UK Survey Reveals Consumer Demand for Wi-Fi Services

Seventy eight percent of people in the United States and 74 percent of people in the United Kingdom who own smartphones with Wi-Fi capabilities would be interested in an application that would use Wi-Fi to deliver 'five bars' of coverage at home or in the office.

Eighty eight percent of these people in the US, and 80 percent of people in the UK would also be interested in a service from their mobile operator that would give discounted calling when the phone was connected to Wi-Fi.

It's interesting to see how similar the US and UK numbers are. These numbers are the results of two online surveys conducted in Q2 2010. The surveys were completely independent of each other and were conducted by two different companies. Yet, the level of interest in more Wi-Fi-based services is high across both geographies.

The US survey was done by MarketTools Zoomerang of 330 US smartphone owners. The UK YouGov online omnibus survey focused on the 23% of nearly 2,200 respondents in the United Kingdom with smartphones.

I encourage you to read the full survey overviews for more data and graphics available at Kineto.com.

More highlights:

In the US -

• 43 percent of people who own smartphones with Wi-Fi capabilities use the Wi-Fi every day.
• 45 percent of those people use Wi-Fi because it provides easy access to the Internet, and 43 percent use it because it is faster than the cellular network.

In the UK -

• 50 percent of people who own smartphones with Wi-Fi capabilities use the Wi-Fi every day;
• 40 percent say they use the Wi-Fi because it is faster for accessing the internet; 50 percent say because it is easier.

Smartphone users are embracing Wi-Fi and seem to want to be able to use it more. There's an opportunity for mobile operators to tap into this tremendous interest and encourage Wi-Fi usage to increase network offload, improve network coverage/performance and gain increasing benefits by offloading traffic to the fixed network.

Read all the rest at Kineto.com. And there's plenty more. Then, tell us what you think in the comments.

Affordable Androids Abound

Android devices are showing distinct signs of picking up speed, as evidenced by Orange's recent announcement it will launch a low-cost LG Android smartphone in Europe later this year.

Orange also reveals its new 'affordable smartphone strategy,' which includes Huawei, ZTE and Gigabyte devices, among others. Lowering smartphone costs will make services more accessible to a larger group of subscribers. So it appears it will be a win-win for Orange - top-notch phones on a strong operating system pulling in more subscribers.

Patrick Remy, Orange's vice president of devices, said: "At the beginning of 2010, 15% of Orange portfolio was smartphones. This will rise to 30% by the end of the year, and will be 50% by 2013."

That seems right in line with the smartphone growth analysts are predicting and other operators are reporting globally.

Smartphone handsets surge

Gartner released some figures on the mobile phone market, and smartphones in general. The information was covered in this article in Total Telecoms.

Last year we picked up a report by RBS projecting a full 50% of all handsets sold in the world in 2014 would be smartphones. They projected something like 1.6b units, and 800m are predicted to be smartphones.

Along comes this report to show that the world is well on it's way. While Gartner is projecting the global handset market to grow 11-13% in 2010, they are reporting 49% year over year actual growth for smartphones. With 54.3m smartphones shipped in the first quarter of 2010, it's easy to project 325m units in 2010, easily extrapolated to 800m units in 2014.

However, consider the implications of 800m smartphones shipped in 2014. Today networks are groaning under the impact of a tiny fraction of that many smartphones. And one trend which I haven't seen reported, but seems to be true in my focus group of one, is that the longer people have smartphones, the more data they use.

I think consumers become confortable with email, then venture into different elements of the smartphone experience, moving pictures, recording videos, hitting Facebook, watching YouTube videos and streaming Pandora. These last two are particular new favorites of mine.

I don't listen to the radio in the car anymore, I just start Pandora and let my smartphone deliver internet radio to my car. And YouTube has become a very easy way to kill time when I'm waiting... for the kids at soccer practice or at the airport or whereever.

The need for Smart Wi-Fi is growing as fast as the shipment of smartphones.

Smartphones are Taking Over

It's not a secret. Smartphones are EVERYWHERE! I (and others) have been singing that tune for a while.

This week, research firm NielsenWire reported "Smartphones to Overtake Feature Phones in U.S. by 2011."

According to specific statistics:

"the share of smartphones as a proportion of overall device sales has increased to 29% for phone purchasers in the last six months and 45% of respondents to a Nielsen survey indicated that their next device will be a smartphone."

Other useful stats:
- 81% of smartphone owners are satisfied with their device; only 66% of feature-phone owners are satisfied with theirs.
- 50% of smartphone users utilize their phone's Wi-Fi to satisfy the need for fast downloads; this is 10-times the percentage of feature phone owners using Wi-Fi on their phones.
- The percentage of people who use their phone for only voice communications drops from 14% among new feature phone owners to 3% of smartphone owners.

In an analysis of the research on Enterprise Mobility Today, Andy Patrizio writes:

"For the most part, Nielsen attributes the shift to smartphones to a groundswell of new smartphone devices, in particular the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android phones, plus an 'explosion' of new applications for them and the significant and continued decrease in the prices of those phones and carriers' data plans."

The smartphone revolution is upon us, now let's talk about the traffic demands of all those users.

Kineto Turns UMA into "Smart Wi-Fi Offload"

Today Kineto, a leader in the UMA space, announced a new "Smart Wi-Fi Offload" solution. For all intents and purposes, it looks like they have renamed UMA into "Smart Wi-Fi Offload".

Not that it's a bad thing...

In the four years since UMA was introduced, there have been some major shifts in the market. Early UMA deployments were on focused on fixed-mobile substitution (FMS), and relied on feature phones (remember the Samsung G709?).

At the time, FMS (and FMC) were hot topics, but the mobile industry had never heard of an iPhone and mobile operators all believed that had more network capacity than they could ever want or need.

Skip ahead to 2010, landlines are a dying breed, subscribers are getting larger buckets of minutes and FMS is a natural occurrence. But the industry has been blind-sided by the meteoric rise of the smartphones, specifically web-driven devices like the iPhone and my Touch.

I was in a meeting with an industry analyst the other day who casually mentioned that he believes mobile operators will need to increase their current network capacity 10x in the next 3-5 years.

Consider that number for a minute. It’s staggering.

Now consider this: what are the options for an operator to increase their network capacity by a factor of 10?

• Add more segments and channels onto existing cells? A good, but finite, idea.
• Install more macro cells? Certainly that continues to be important, but even doubling the current number of towers probably wouldn’t increase network capacity 10x.
• Femtocells? Certainly this is an important technology, but there continue to be a range of growing pains.
• Wi-Fi is a great option. It’s already installed in the homes and offices of these ‘smartphone’ users, it doesn’t interfere with the macro network, and now with Kineto’s solution, it can be added as an application to the range of offending smartphones.

The reality is that to achieve a 10x increase in capacity, mobile operators are going to need to do all these things in earnest, starting today.

I think Smart Wi-Fi Offload is a good first step.