LTE/4G Makes 2011 The Year of the Soft Client

by Andy on 08. Dec, 2010 in Andy, Apple, BlackBerry, Business, Cloud Communications, IP Communications, Telephony, VoIP Voyces Blog

With Verizon rolling out LTE in some 30+ cities and over 60 airports this past weekend the press has been playing off of the download speeds.

What they’re missing is the fact that latency will be much, much lower and that means VOICE over IP is going to flourish and as such make 2011 the year of the softclient. Between LTE, Clear‘s Mobile WiMax platform and both AT&T and T-Mobile rolling out uber-fast HSPA+ networks in the next year, more and more people with 4G connectivity will find that voice over the data pipe will be more and more common place. Sure Skype will get the consumer traffic but the big winner will be the enterprise and small business VoIP providers and carriers who can now have a soft client like CounterPath’s Bria on either their laptop or mobile phones (Android, iPhone) with not only the usual flavors of VoIP (g.711 and g.729) but also full, robust HD voice using the g.722 codec.

With the faster pipe, and lower latency, the soft clients will be able to easily and seamlessly connect to the office PBX or hosted PBX system, which is one reason why ShoreTel snapped up Agito Networks a few months back. This ability to connect means that more features, like four digit dialing are coming, as well as far more tightly integrated billing capabilities. Now CDRs (call detail records) of lawyers and anyone who bills for their time will be much more trackable, and there won’t be the need to track minutes on the cell phone any longer by those folks.

For companies like cBeyond, Telesphere, SimpleSignal, OnSip, XO, CallTower, MegaPath and others chasing the big money business markets marrying the softphone, concepts like FMC (fixed mobile convergence) and others all finally get the opportunity to be what they have been built to be, thanks to LTE.