Why I Don’t Use VoIP On Mobile Handsets
There are a lot of great companies out there that offer some form of VoIP on a mobile handset. The VoIP can occur over either a WiFi, 3G data connection, or come in over the normal GSM or CDMA voice channel. Regardless of the method used, I have made an active decision not to use these services on my mobile handset.
Now I want to be clear–it’s not because I don’t think the technology is neat. I like it. There are actually three reasons I refuse to do it: different interface to make a call, battery life, and (lack of) cost savings.
First, let’s talk about the user interface. Making and receiving calls on phones is a fairly straightforward activity. However, many methods of using VoIP on the mobile handset change this somehow. The best interface is actually on WiFi-enabled Nokia handsets where, if you have VoIP configured properly, making a VoIP call is actually as easy as making a regular call through the GSM network. There are other services that run on Nokia handsets that will dynamically reroute calls through a different number in order to save money.
Second of all, battery life. This doesn’t apply as much to the services that don’t run over 3G and WiFi, both notorious battery drainers. However, an application running on the phone does take up some battery life, so it’s not an entirely zero sum game.
The third, and perhaps most important reason I don’t use these services regularly is the lack of cost savings. Ignoring the fact my employer pays my bill each month, calling within the United States is basically zero extra cost. It’s included in the per-minute rate. I quite simply don’t make that many international calls. The one or two I do make, my employer will pay for, no questions asked.
Let’s review: changes the way calls are made, less battery life, and lack of savings. Doesn’t sound like a winning combination in my book, but maybe your situation is different.
photo credit: garryknight
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Tags: gsm, Mobile phone, voip, Wi-Fi Fnord
Comment by dziny
You raise a very good point, it doesn’t make much sense to use voip if you are in the US, you call US numbers and somebody else is paying your bill. My situation is exactly oposite – I’m usually not in US, but call US a lot and some other countries (Slovakia, UK) and I pay my phone bills (prepaid). So I’m using voip on N95 whenever possible. I don’t connect to any of the zillions voip providers though, but use my own asterisk server.
A small statistic (from the data on my phone):
Total calls (4 weeks of data) 16h 07min
Voice calls: 1h 15min
Intenet calls:14h 52min
Agree with the point that the battery live suffers. But it’s much better over wifi than 3G, so I never use 3G for voip even though it’s possible. Voip over 3G has 3 problems in my eyes: data charges, worse voice quality in the direction from you due to smaller upload speed and it kills the battery.
Comment by spg
it has not always been this way. in the very early days of VOIP the providers beat the lowest calling card pricing out there. this is no longer true. the fact is that although i would like to use SIP services for all of my outbound international calls whether from mobile or a SIP phone that the calling cards available at many convenience stores best the best deals out there by almost 50%. of course the SIP providers may offer free or extremely cheap calls to the lowest cost destinations. but where i end up spending some significant money is on calls to the more expensive destinations(such as cell phone in europe). these call i find are about half the price from the best calling card deals compared to the best VOIP deals; and i generally get better call quality. before i hear all the arguments about quality versus cost my experience after eliminating the super high cost major carrier(sprint, At&T, etc.) i do not find any correlation. there are cards that have different costs and those that have different quality. but some of the more expensive ones have horrible voice quality and i have found some incredibly inexpensive ones with great voice quality.
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Comment by Al
I use Truphone on my N95 a lot. My dad is in Bangkok and I call him a few times per week. He’s not on his computer all the time, so we can’t use skype or msn.
I’m still using Truphone’s introductory rates, so calls are really cheap, better than most calling cards and sometimes free.
Battery life is not a big deal, I’m always home when I call (since I’m using wifi). I can just plug in when I’m out of juice.
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[...] Three simple reasons why telcos can breathe easy that VoIP-over-wifi won’t disrupt service revenues: VoIP user interfaces are (too often) not integrated into the handset; running a VoIP app kills [...]
Comment by jared
i’ve done the math and will be relying on VoIP to lower my fiancé’s phone bill soon, i’ve done mine this way for a year now. it boils down to reducing the number of minutes you get on your plan.
she and i will leave our current plans with 600 minutes each, and move to a family plan withonly 550 minutes total. we’ll place all of our outbound calls via VoIP for several months, saving up “rollover minutes” on the AT&T family plan. with a solid buffer in place, we can use the bundled minutes without fear of going over the our alloted minutes.
gizmo5.com outbound calls are about $0.02/min within the US which is dirt cheap — cheaper than the per minute cost of the bundled time (550 minutes, paying for just the voice plan comes to $60: thats over $0.10 per minute we pay for the bundled minutes. with a package equal to our current individual plans, it comes down to about $0.07/min — still far more than gizmo)
so, essentially, we don’t pay for what we dont use. we have to prepay for SOME bundled minutes, but we’ll keep that to a minimum for a few months using voip, thus saving up our minutes until we have a lot, then we can slowly burn those off until we see they’re about gone (skydeck.com) and go ahead with the voip again until we see our rollover balance up in friendly, safe, buffered goodness (my individual plan currently has over 3400 minutes saved up becuase i have been on the truphone free-calling-tariff for about a year now, using pretty much NONE of my built-in minutes).
so – i disagree with the premise that voip can’t save you money in the usa. it’s just not as straight forward as it could be, and you need to subscribe to a provider that lets you save your monthly unused minutes (not sure if any but at&t do this)
-jared
Comment by PhoneBoy
@jared everyone has to do the math for themselves. Clearly you’ve done that and using Gizmo5 makes sense for you.
Comment by Zahir
Okay here’s my 2 cents on the subject.
I agree with this statement from Telephony 2.0 “Three simple reasons why telcos can breathe easy that VoIP-over-wifi won’t disrupt service revenues: VoIP user interfaces are (too often) not integrated into the handset; running a VoIP app kills cycle time and battery life”
I have an HTC Touch and battery life is about average (2 days on regular use) but if I turn on the wifi and use Fring or Express Talk to make SIP calls on Onesuite then battery will be out in 2 or 3 hours under full charge.
Comment by Jared Eldredge
your HTC touch dies that fast on VoIP? my N95 isn’t a power-friendly device, but i get much better performance from it. perhaps due to the dedicated sip hardware? if i stay connected to a singled WLAN all day, without having the phone log in and out over and over again, i get similar power performance as i do with GSM. the only time VoIP is significantly worse than GSM for me is if i attempt to have the phone auto-connect to WLANs and i move around a lot, forcing it to utilize the WLAN radio all the time (rather than entering an idle state). this happens if i’m walking around downtown on the public wifi; or if i’m at the university walking through buildings as the wifi signal degrades a lot (but is often better than the GSM coverage).
so, i guess when it comes to VoIP you have to pick the right device. i suppose that’s equally true for #g, etc – look at the iPhone 3G and the horrifyingly poor reception people get… and when they get reception, it’s painfully slow (an order of magnitude slower than common WinMo or Nokia devices). so, the playing field isn’t level across devices with respect to new technology. that’s nothing new. we should be happy that GSM performance has stabilized enough that most people expect all phones to have about the same success rates and such. HTC? get a Nokia and enjoy the VoIP that is otherwise beyond your reach.
*notATallBIASED*
-bit