Hey GSMA: Got Voice?

Yesterday the GSMA announced a marketing program to promote and develop ‘always connected’ mobile broadband services in a wide range of consumer products.

While the momentum has been building for some time, the GSMA is looking to highlight the growing trend of HSPA devices (laptops, MIDs,…) which offer consumers a mobile broadband experience.

At UMA Today, our first thought was: Got Voice?

Giving consumers an ‘always connected’ mobile broadband experience is great… especially for VoIP providers like Skype and Vonage. These companies have traditionally been tethered to fixed broadband connections in the home or office.

Now mobile operators are providing them a high speed, low latency, always on mobile broadband network from which to deliver a mobile VoIP service.

While data services are certainly a booming growth area for mobile operators, this service amounts to a ‘dumb pipe’ approach. The fundamental revenue-generating application for the mobile operators, telephony, is conspicuously absent.

It’s clear why. Mobile operators don’t want to invest in a SIP/IMS core simply to provide their own VoIP service. The investment is too great, and the return is minimal.

What operators need is a way to leverage their existing voice service core (MSCs).

This is what UMA technology is all about: extending the mobile operator’s existing services over broadband.

There are several UMA-based softphone mobile clients available today. These products can easily be bundled with an HSPA service. Now when a user connects to the mobile broadband network, they can have the operators own a mobile VoIP application running on the laptop.

It could be that Orange is one of the first to recognize the opportunity.

Softmobile client from Gemalto

A UMA-enabled softmobile client is an application which has been on the drawing board for some time. There has been interest, but it’s been slow in coming.

For those who don’t know, the UMA-enabled softmobile client is a mobile telephony interface application which runs on a laptop and connects to the mobile core network via UMA.

The application is ideal for operators to offer their subscribers another way to use their services, especially when traveling outside the home country. Typically when I travel to Europe, I connect my laptop at the hotel and fire up Skype. But if I were to have a softmobile client from my GSM provider T-Mobile, I could use it instead.

Back at MWC 08, technology supplier Vitendo announced they had developed a UMA-based soft mobile. In addition, Gemalto announced that Orange has selected their UpTEQ Smart Dongle. But the announcement said nothing about UMA.

Now on their web site, the UpTeq Smart Dongle lists support for UMA.

This week, Orange UK announced plans to ratchet up their services and alluded to, among other things, a “…new ‘totally connected’ product line – including laptops, to build on fixed and mobile broadband capabilities”

We’ll have to keep an eye out to see if Orange UK becomes the launch pad for the softmobile application.