Since some months I’ve been looking closely to Jajah, and the whole VoIP industry. I’ve talked about ways of how the wireless internet networks could take over the cell phones and wondering how the communications would be in some years. I’ve been investigating the evolution of the different paths and I’ve get to the conclusion that “technologically” speaking, the world is yet not ready for a whole VoIP interconnected communications and Jajah has come to a solution for it.
Let’s start with two premises:
The trend goes 100% sure toward mobile: The use of fixed phones is decreasing each year. It’s neither economically (operators) nor a preferred option (people). It has become unsustainable for operators that have struggled to put video and internet on the lines to create more value.
Wireless technologies WiFi and WiMAX are not ready yet: Even if it’s the cheapest way of communications, and the trend toward deployment and development is growing, some years have to pass in order to be a reality.
WiFi and WiMAX challenges
WiFi has two limitations, the coverage and the heterogeneity. To cover an acceptable area of a city, there are needed lots of hotspots, economically unsustainable for an operator. Approaches such as FON where everyone shares the connection solve this issue in the economical matters, but the limitation is that the connection is not reliable as there’s not a direct control of the network. The second limitation is the hand over (switch from one access point to another), if you move further the coverage of the AP you are connected to, you loose your connection until you connect to the next one. There are companies such as Cisco which has solved this issue but is a proprietary protocol and there’s no standard out there.
In the other hand, WiMAX limitations are due to the high frequency it uses. It goes over the 3.4Mhz and with this frequencies, an obstacle such as a tree or a building could block the signal.
I’m for sure not saying that it’s an impossible thing to make any of this technologies work. I’m pointing out that in order these technologies to be “ready” there’s some work to be done, and some years to pass.
Jajah’s solution
Jajah is a neat VoIP platform such as Skype, Vonage, among others, that you can find in www.jajah.com where you just need to enter your phone number, the number you want to call and voila! They connect both numbers ringing first in yours and then in the destination one. The company has today stated that by the end of this year there would be ready a little application compatible with 80 different cell phone models, that would permit to start calls without the use of the internet but with the use of this little program in you mobile phone. It’s like if they had read my article “Something better than Skype?” In this article I stated that a big contra of their solution was that if it was using neither your computer nor your internet connection to talk, why should you actually use them?
Jajah has also stated today that it wanted to become “the Skype of the mobile world” If the future of communications is going to be mostly mobile, then if Jajah manages to become what it plans, for certain, it would become the leader.