Nokia gives telcos the weapons to fight back against VoIP

Stuart Corner
Friday, 01 December 2006 01:01

Business IT - Technology

Nokia suggests that "operators can offer both PC-PC calls, calls to mobile phones, or calls to traditional telephones at competitive rates and can bundle rich call services in innovative ways. Rich Calls can be charged to same account as the subscriber's fixed or mobile calls, simplifying their billing and avoiding, for example, the need to set up separate, pre-paid accounts for a VoIP service.

And for good measure. "The Nokia Communication Suite can also allow travelling subscribers to avoid roaming charges for mobile calls when abroad."

And if all this is not enough, Nokia suggests that telco swimmers in VoIP waters might try sinking VoIP upstarts like Skype by blocking their peer-to-peer traffic. Also on show at Nokia World is the previously announced Nokia Peer-to-peer Traffic Control, billed as "the industry's first integrated solution to allow mobile operators to profitably control the bandwidth available for peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, and thus balance the allocation of network resources." It is implemented as a software upgrade to the Nokia Flexi Intelligent Service Node and will be commercially available during the first half of 2007.