Archive for May, 2009

American company TCM Mobile claimed recently to have built the world’s first totally VoIP-based cellular network – a story which we covered here. I caught up for a quick chat with company president Haim Yashar to find out more.

First I asked him for a little bit of background on the company. Having spent quite a few years immersed in the mobile and VoIP space, I hadn’t heard of them before – and was curious of what differed their offering from existing mobile VoIP services, like Vopium, Nimbuzz and most recently Skype.

‘We founded the company five years ago’, Haim explained. ‘Our goal was to create a new mobile technology without the entrance barriers of traditional cellular services – for instance the high cost of infrastructure, and the limited availability and relative expense of licensed GSM and 3G spectrum. We wanted to remove these restrictions by developing a platform that provided the quality, services and robustness of a traditional cellular service but with the flexibility of VoIP technology and using unlicensed frequency space, like 2.4GHz [traditionally used for low power Wi-Fi services]‘.

Whilst the theory was good, how would such a technology work in practice – especially with the limitations of using such frequency ranges – for instance interference, capacity, etc.?

‘Our R&D team, based in Israel, knew that this wouldn’t be a simple job. We’ve spent five years overcoming the hurdles involving capacity, hand-off, scalability, and quite importantly the fact we’re sharing spectrum with an increasing amount of Wi-Fi base stations and the like. The whole system has been built from scratch with these limitations in mind – and I believe we are now at the stage where we have a platform using our own patented technology which is comparable – if not better than – traditional GSM’.

So if it uses VoIP technology and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi spectrum, could services designed for the TCM platform work as VoIP Wi-Fi handsets, and more importantly, with an increasing amount of smartphones supporting these technologies, vice-versa? Plus could a TCM designed handset roam off to a traditional GSM network?

‘Good questions. Whilst TCM handsets can connect to regular VoIP services over Wi-Fi, it’s not as great the other way around. Our handsets feature special hardware and software components to overcome the issues we discussed earlier, for instance seamless handover, frequency management, and dealing with interference from other users on the same channels. As for GSM roaming, our first generation of handsets don’t have GSM radio at the moment, but it is something we’re expecting to offer within the coming months’.

Sticking with the whole compatibility theme, I put a theoretical question to Haim. If a company with a public Wi-Fi network, such as The Cloud or BT Openzone, wanted to deploy TCM’s technology and offer a cellular service, could they re-use their existing Wi-Fi access points? ‘Unfortunately not’, he replies. ‘Our platform is designed to be secure, robust, reliable and support all the features you’d expect on a regular GSM network – plus more. Existing Wi-Fi access points – whilst good for data – are not really designed for the service levels and features our users would come to expect, so whilst we would share the same frequency space as an existing Wi-Fi network it would require our own technology to provide voice services’.

So who are TCM Mobile’s prospective customers? ‘Something you should understand is this: we’re a technology company, not a vendor or a standard equipment supplier – and a very well funded one at that. Our aim was to develop the technology – and we’re now considering the next step to bring the product to market. We’ve had considerable interest from companies in parts of the world like India, where deploying traditional GSM technology in rural areas is very costly and takes many resources. The thing they like about our offering is they can roll out cellular services to these areas at a fraction of the cost and resource requirements normally associated with GSM. For instance our base stations are small enough – and have such low energy requirements – that a site can be run off a small generator’.

With an open invitation to visit their trial deployment in Syracuse, New York, and so many more questions to ask, I felt I’d gained a little more insight into TCM Mobile. However with our allotted interview time already close to running out and the joys of a conference call routed from London through New York and onwards to Israel meaning it wasn’t so easy to make each other heard, I had to leave it there for now. It’ll be interesting to watch this company and their future announcements – I’m sure we haven’t heard the last from them.