The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
A key attribute to the service is that users retain their normal mobile number and this is what the called party sees even when the call is made as a VoIP call over WiFi. Freshtel's ability to offer this in the UK is the result of long negotiations with the regulator. It said at the launch last November that it was holding similar discussions with the Australian regulator, the ACMA.
Freshtel project manager, Greg Snow, told iTWire this week that this would be a feature of the Australian service, and that the company could see nothing in the regulations to preclude it.
"It could be a problem if you were spoofing someone else's number but we require authentication to confirm that the customer actually owns the number," he said.
At present the Tesco service is supported only by the Nokia E51, N81, E65, N95, phones and the bad news for Freshtel and Tesco might be that Nokia appears to be withdrawing support for VoIP from its handsets, reportedly to appease its telco customers worried out losing revenue to services such as TalkWifi.
Well known US blogger Om Malik reported last month "[Nokia] seems to have developed cold feet, and some of its new handsets, such as the new N78, are not VoIP compatible anymore." However O'Donnell said "This has not been confirmed by Nokia and it would be unlikely that they would remove functionality that there customers want."
Snow added that, as Freshtel develops its application on the underlying Symbian platform, it would not be affected by a move by Nokia to simply remove access to the VoIP functionality from the user interface. Freshtel said in May that its R&D team was working with a number of handset manufacturers to broaden the range supporting TalkWifi. Snow said that the company hoped to announce details before the end of the year.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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