Overview
VoIP or Voice over IP technology is becoming more and more popular by the time. It uses an Internet connection to transmit voice data from one user to other. The key for the success of VoIP technology is that they offer cheap mobile services as compared to traditional phone. Traditionally, this technology is limited to those users who have any VoIP device or personal computer and connected to Internet. Therefore, this limitation restricted the Voice over IP penetration to users who are constrained to office or home environment.
But now users, who own a mobile phone and have access to data using Wi-Fi, GPRS, EDGE, or 3Gconnection, can use Voice over IP technology, Mobile VoIP or mVoIP, to reduce their call rates. There are several methods to integrate VoIP network in mobile handset. Two of them are –
- Turning the mobile device into a SIP client, which afterward uses a data network for receiving and sending communications, and to receive and send RTP for the voice path.
- Other implementation is using a softswitch, such as gateway to bridge RTP and SIP into mobile network’s SS7 (Signaling System #7, which is a set of telephone signaling protocols) infrastructure.
Technologies
mVoIP depends on two technologies –
- Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) – the Unlicensed Mobile Access (GAN) Generic Access Network, which extends mobile voice, data and Session Initiation Protocol/IP Multimedia Subsystem applications over IP networks.
- Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) – It is a signaling protocol, which is widely used for controlling multimedia communication sessions like video and voice calls over IP.
Requirement of mVoIP
The reason for the implementation of Mobile VoIP is to free users from the computer and access VoIP technology using the mobile phones. Moreover, making a call is cheaper as compared to normal telephones. To access mVoIP, you need a handset with SIP capability and a network (like 3G, EDGE, Wi-Fi, GPRS, etc.). You can even use Skype on your mobile phone, which does not require any SIP support.
The development of mVoIP was considered to be extremely important. Since, VoIP technology will not be emerging technology in the future if it remains to be wired as today’s trend is connectivity within the context of mobility. Mobile VoIP has become the new generation of IP-based or Internet voice call option.