Hans-Arne L’orange, CEO of the London, UK-based ISV, said the company is looking at two other major handset players as potential partners, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Motorola Inc.
The rationale for each is geographical, in that while the Nokia alliance gives Tower a partnership with the world market leader (with around 34% of the global handset market), Samsung is strong in APAC and Motorola in the Americas.
The Vyke service involves a VoIP client on the phone which is registered on a given wireless LAN the first time it is within range, and then fires up and is registered automatically whenever the user re-enters its catchment area.
VoIP calls can then be made over the WLAN, with the call to the Vyke server being all-IP and free, Vyke handling the PSTN break-out in such a way that it is charged at the rate of a local call plus a small delta. Vyke buys wholesale capacity from two brokers and 28 network providers around the world in order to offer the low break-out rates.
Consumers get Vyke breakout on a prepaid basis, whereas enterprise customers can take post-paid contracts with PIN numbers for each of the users to whom they want to extend the service, L’orange explained.
When a WiFi connection is not available, the Vyke client can still reduce the cost of comms by invoking an electronic call-back service over a GPRS connection, which is perhaps a tad cumbersome vis-a-vis calling direct, but works out a lot cheaper, he argued.
Our call-back service is between 40% and 60% cheaper than making a regular international phone call from a mobile, while the VoWLAN calls work out 80% to 90% cheaper, he claimed. As for comparisons with VoIP champion Skype, L’orange commented that we’re between 5% and 50% cheaper than them, depending on the destination.
It will be interesting to see which of the two target handset manufacturers Tower prioritizes in terms of striking an alliance for bundling its Vyke client onto their smart phones. Operating systems are not an obstacle, in that the client already runs on Symbian at Nokia can also be downloaded to HTC’s Windows Mobile 5.0 PDA phones. Linux would be a further development project.
The real challenge, however, is the APIs to integrate with the specific implementations of each OS by the different manufacturers, and it is for this reason that Tower needs to negotiate partnerships. On the face of it, Samsung would appear to offer greater opportunities, given its strength in Asia, where most of the growth in the GSM world is expected to come from in the next few years.
