Vonage's Killer iPhone app

Last week I spoke with Vonage's (News - Alert) Michael Tempora, Senior VP Product & Program Management about the launch of Vonage World and Visual Voicemail. The big news was "Vonage World" with unlimited calling across the world to over 60 countries, which covers 2/3 of the world's population (4.5 billion) - all for $24.99/month.

As an aside I also asked him if Vonage was working on an iPhone (News - Alert) app. He said it was in the works but couldn't comment further. I was going to blog about it back on the 19th, but got busy preparing for ITEXPO. Speaking of which, I'm blogging this using Virgin Atlantic's GoGo wireless. Too bad it isn't free. Was $12.95 which was nearly the same price ($15) I had to pay to check a single bag. Whatever happened to the first bag is free? Anyway...

Sources have revealed that Vonage has submittd their app to Apple (News - Alert). Having a Vonage iPhone app combined with Vonage's World's global unlimited $24.99 plan could be a killer app that gives Vonage a shot in the arm. Imagine a SIP client on the iPhone that lets you call 60 countries - 2/3 of the world - as much as you want for just $24.99/month. Combine the large user base of iPhone users and the millions of Vonage users and what you could have is the most largely deployed WiFi (News - Alert) VoIP phone on the planet! Forget about buying those standalone WiFi SIP or Skype phones which is another device you have to carry.

But it gets better... Vonage's current SIP client called Vonage Companion has unique technology which enables it to "share" the same SIP credentials with your ATA device connected to your home cordless system. Thus, you can accept an incoming call on your PC using Vonage Companion or answer the call using your regular analogy phone connected to your SIP-compliant ATA. I discussed this single identity to multiple SIP devices with Vonage last year.

In a mid-2008 interview I had with Mary Grikas, Vonage's Executive Director of Device Development I asked, "What sort of technical challenges did you have having the same CallerID and the same phone number? Obviously, you are leveraging SIP and the ATA that sits at the home residence logs on with one set of SIP credentials and Vonage Companion logs on with different SIP credentials, but it's mapped on your back-end to the same phone number."

Mary responded, "That's really a great question because we actually had to put almost a whole new infrastructure in place with a lot of new equipment. And we actually have proxies that are just dedicated to Companion to handle those calls. We do differentiate between the home TA DID credential and we do have flag for Companion. That way we know, as you said on the back-end it's all mapped and then we know where the call originates. We know if a call originates from Companion versus originating from the TA." Mary continued, "That was a lot of work for our call processing team. They had to do a lot of work onfiguring that system and all the redundancy and mapping. It was a pretty big effort, but it's something we were committed to doing because we had such an overwhelming request from our customers to implement a feature like that.

• Voicemail playback
• Voicemail push notification
• Send to Voicemail
• Block caller

Tags: app, apple, iphone, sip, siphon, voip, vonage Related tags: vonage iphone, vonage companion, phone number, launch vonage, vonage world, vonage

Follow me:
Facebook Profile
FriendFeed Profile
Google Reader Profile
LinkedIn Profile
Netflix Profile
Twitter Profile

Google Voice + Gizmo5 = Free Inbound & Outbound Calls - Jul 27, 2009

Next-gen iPod touch Features Mic, Video, and VoIP? - Jul 21, 2009

Skype for iPhone 1.1 Update - Jul 01, 2009

Skype Video Calls on Google Android - Jun 19, 2009

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]