The Skype application for the iPhone has quickly moved up the charts and become one of the most popular downloads in the Apple Store. This application gives users access to the Skype network and free calling to other Skype users as well as the paid outbound per-minute Skype service. The potential user pool is going to keep increasing as the application is ported to other devices such as Blackberry and Nokia phones.

Wireless carriers are taking different stances about what VoIP applications they will support and the method that will allow them to be implemented. For example, one carrier is allowing use of the Skype application at Wi-Fi hotspots, but not on the 3G network. From a wireless carrier this makes sense as they do not want to lose minutes that would normally flow over their network, but other carriers are blocking both Wi-Fi and 3G and have policy to not allow VoIP calling.

As a wholesale voice carrier, Tata Communications is very interested in how all this is going to shake out. Tata is a natural transport for wireless carriers as well as VoIP companies such as Skype, whose users are placing off-net calls and have a per-minute charge. From our perspective, we can transport both the traditional wireless minutes as well as the VoIP minutes, so it is potentially a win-win situation for us.

-Michael Corso
Product Manager, VoIP Link Services

Convergence looks a lot like the most popular consumer technology purchases right now: smartphones and netbooks. The differences between a full-featured smartphone such as a Blackberry or iPhone, and a small, portable netbook designed to weigh just a few pounds while handling simple tasks such as email and web browsing, are becoming smaller.

Similarly, phones that use WiFi networks for web access, and computers with 3G modems are blurring hard-and-fast boundaries between phones and computers as well. With consumers increasingly using converged devices, the demand for converged services will inevitably follow. An all-IP network vastly lowers the challenges in delivering multiple services to one customer, as well as services that span the divide between voice and data.

When contemplating the IP future, members of the voice industry sometimes look at the business model of Internet providers and experience some trepidation about the transition. The flat-rate, buffet-style pricing offered by the vast majority of ISPs strikes many in the voice industry as a step backward in terms of building sustainable margins.

However, flat-rate billing has also been used across the voice industry, in various geographies at different times, without evolving to become the dominant business model. In North America, local calls have traditionally been sold at a flat rate, and the major cellphone providers offer unlimited plans for data, texts and even voice. International calls, however, are almost always charged per minute in North America, while flat-rate international pricing has become popular from VoIP providers in Europe.

For customers, the value of flat-rate billing can be as much about convenience and predictability as about lower costs, suggesting that there can be room within the market for a variety of billing models to coexist peacefully.

Bilaterals provide an important means for wholesale carriers to ensure high call quality through a direct connection to the terminating party. Bilaterals also provide more flexibility in billing arrangements, such as a bill and keep for a predetermined amount of traffic.

As a group of major carriers with a focus on the nuts-and-bolts of the IP migration process, the i3 Forum has been dedicating discussions to ensuring that the benefits of bilateral connections are maintained in an IP environment. The discussions have involved technical standards and processes for migration, as well as business models for IP-based bilaterals.

Tata Communications has been participating in the discussions to share experience gained from setting up and maintaining VoIP bilaterals, and to support a timeframe that involves migrating the first bilaterals to pure IP within the year.

Tata Communications is also participating in other industry groups, such as the IPIA, that are engaged in projects that will influence the form that bilaterals take in an IP world.

Is the glass half full or half empty? The human reflex of selective deafness to information or arguments countering one’s established beliefs lives on. The ISOC organized a lunchtime IPv6 panel at IETF 74 in San Francisco illustrates the point. The half full perception is exemplified by one write-up on the event, the half-empty by another. A third write-up seems to be the closest to what constitutes objectivity, uncorrected for any confirmation bias of my own.

Natural pessimists continue to hide behind lack of business case, ROI, lack of customer demand, cost, complexity. Mention lack of backward compatibility and it appears under title of “fatal flow for IPv6”, mention a “broccoli approach to IPv6 implementation” and the bias will depend on whether or not one likes broccoli. When forced to swallow, they will probably go on a diet of hard to digest transition technologies and NATcho’s.

Natural optimists see a new world of applications and phenomenal opportunities stirring under the surface of the internet. They integrate IPv6 as part of their network equipment and service upgrade cycles and consider new application domains to satisfy humanity’s insatiable hunger to search, consume, produce and exchange information anytime, anywhere. When Google turned on AAAA’s for Google Maps, IPv6 traffic tripled within days. Trapped underground IPv6 lakes start to break the surface of an increasingly arid and parched IPv4 internet.

Maybe there are is a genetic base and evolutionary benefit for our confirmation bias?

This post originally appeared on CircleID.