Telephony as we know it is here to say. And for a rather long time.
We are in a wonderful industry of disruption. VoIP. WebRTC. OTT. Bringing down walled gardens. Some would say democratizing telephony, and try to compare it to the Arab Spring (newsflash: democracies and social media ended up on the losing side in the Arab Spring).
We think VoIP and WebRTC is going to change the way we call from our mobile. If only those dinosaur telecom companies would grab their collected asses and adopt VoIP. Surrender to the new world order.
The end of telephony they shout. The death of carrers they declare. Note that soon.
The main problem we have with VoIP solutions is that they are sucking the life out of our handset’s battery and they do it a lot faster than the technologies we have on the same phones for the calls the telecom companies provide us.
Now is the time to jump up and down and say that the carriers are to blame here – they are making it hard for OTT players to do their job and trying to put sticks in their wheels – not letting OTT players optimize their apps for the phones.
I’d agree with such a statement, if only there was any truth in it in this case:
- It is an operating system world these days. Carriers don’t get to choose what APIs an OS (think Android and iOS) provides to OTT developers – they don’t have a say in it, so how can they interfere?
- The carrier’s own VoIP solutions aren’t on par with their traditional telephony.
Kevin Fitchard from GigaOm is following that trend – the power consumption of phones. And guess what? To run a VoLTE call (that would be the VoIP call of an operator) takes more battery power than doing the same call over GSM or CDMA:
Spirent’s tests concluded that the LG Spirit would support 875 minutes of talk time in CDMA mode, but only 575 minutes when solely making 4G calls. The Spirit’s bigger battery (with 38 percent more capacity than the Connect) gives the device a big boost in single-charge lifespan, but that 300-minute differential is still huge.
The reason, if you ask me, is due to the place processing takes place.
Think of a mobile phone as a device with two CPUs: one CPU taking care of the radio signals, connecting the phone to the cellular network, while the other CPU takes care of visualization and application logic.
Now, for traditional calls, the processing of the call takes place on the CPU taking care of the radio signal – there’s no “application logic” involved. This CPU is optimized for such things and for battery life. VoIP calls require going up to the other CPU – the one doing application logic and visualization – why? Simply because it requires IP connectivity – and that fact means the call gets processed in application space and optimizing it is done by software and not hardware accelerated. Tough life.
To change this architecture of phones isn’t going to be easy. So either we go that route, or wait for a real breakthrough in battery technologies before we can kiss goodbye to our traditional dialing system.
On mobile, we need more than just an all IP network and WebRTC to win the day. We need to make them power efficient.