Back in April, T-Mobile released Bobsled, an application that allowed its users to initiate voice chats with their Facebook friends and leave messages on their walls. For one reason or another, the whole thing was taken down only a week later.
Last week, they brought it back; this time with the added functionality of free calls to any US mobile or landline number. The upgraded version of Bobsled comes in two forms, both of which require you to sign up using your Facebook profile. You can download the application as an extension for your Internet browser—think of it as the ‘Phone’ in your Gmail, except with a mandatory Facebook login and the added inconvenience of having to download an 18 megabyte file—or as an iPhone or Android application.
The iPhone and Android version currently limits your calls to your Facebook friends and the call will only go through if they also have Bobsled. If they don’t, you get an option to leave a voice message on their Facebook wall or invite them to join you on Bobsled.
In a lot of ways, the mobile version of Bobsled is a lot like some of the other applications that require you and a friend to both have the same application installed to work. Comparisons to Skype and Viber immediately come to mind. This isn’t anything new, although according to T-mobile, there are plans to match the functionality of the browser version in the future.
What is new is the fact that T-mobile is the first of the major wireless carriers to embrace VoIP for the everyday consumer. If this isn’t a sign that mobile VoIP and alternative text messaging apps are making carriers uncomfortable, I don’t know what is. T-mobile’s Bobsled is also built using Vivox, a SIP platform (more investigation to come).
For the moment, it seems a bit unclear how T-mobile will generate revenue from this Bobsled experiment. There’s talk and speculation about ads, which is what Google’s doing. However, if they decide to move forward, I see this as an admission that in the near future, revenues from calling and text messaging plans will dry up and all that will be left is data. It may take 2 or 3 or 5 years and longer, but it’s coming.
Predicting a winner in mobile VoIP
In the end, I would like to think that the war for mobile VoIP dominance will be won by standards-based, openly configurable SIP mobile clients. It’s quiet, not as flashy, and doesn’t have hundreds of millions of users yet, but it’s arguably the most powerful.
If you’re new to our blog or new to SIP, let me take a few moments to tell you about the benefits of configurable SIP phones. SIP is the de facto standard protocol for establishing, conducting, and ending a VoIP call. It’s provider and device ‘agnostic’. This means that it doesn’t matter if my SIP provider is OnSIP and my friend’s is sip2sip.info; the call between us will work, and it will be free. It doesn’t matter if I’m using Bria on my iPhone and he’s using CSIPSimple on an Android, the call will work. I can, of course, also call him at his IP desk phone. Again it doesn’t matter what brand of desk phone he’s using—it can be a Polycom, an Aastra, or some brand we’ve never even heard of, as long as it’s a SIP call, it will all be free. Did I also mention that text messages can be sent via SIP? Can you guess how much it costs? F-R-E-E. To learn more about SIP, check out our dedicated SIP pages.
So why doesn't everyone already have a device-agnostic SIP address that they can use to call any other SIP user for free? I think there are two main reasons:
1. Device and provider agnostic solutions sound great for the customer, but if you're the company creating the product, you are probably looking at it from a different perspective. Profits go up if you can successfully lock your customers in.
2. Openly configurable SIP clients are not as accessible as some of the ‘one-click-and-you’re-done’ alternatives. It takes a bit more work to set up, although this will certainly get better with time.