Basically can Skype/Truphone or another run on the 3GS on T-mobile in Germany?

What is the deal with the pay per month VoIP with T-mobile does this then mean you can use Skype or Truephone legally?!

In Europe, and the UK in particular, the operators have had to pay a huge amount for spectrum. Building an LTE network, which many of us would like to see, will require huge investment, which has to come from somewhere. I’m not convinced that the operators are currently rolling in cash. I have read that T-mobile and Three are losing, but I’m not sure how authoritative that was.

I think in the UK one has to question whether having five competing 3G operators brings the benefits that competition is supposed to bring. I don’t think they can all afford to build a high-speed network covering the whole country. It would seem crazy to have five networks covering the rural areas, all trying the chase the same few customers. I know collaborations have been announced, to some degree as a result of pressure from Ofcom.

Similarly I don’t think all five operators can afford to roll out an LTE network. More likely they will all want cherry pick the lucrative areas such as commercial centres of big cities. That’s my guess.

I am not related to operators in anyway and a simple user working in embedded system company but I do emapthise with them.

Its not only few servers that operator needs to install. billions dollar spectrum auction, billions of dollars goes to network Equipment vendors (NSN, Alcalucent etc.) then maintaenenace, backhaul bandwidth etc. So why should they give free ride to VOIP companies. I wonder why VOIP companies can’t share revenue with operators, why they want free ride.

Its like you need a connectivevity between 2 cities to run your truck so you build the road, we won’t contribute as its your need. However once road is built please allow to run my car on this road as my transport mechanism is different than yours and more efficient. There is no free ride in the world. If you couldn’t involve during road was built then you can pay toll tax for your ride.

It’s simple enough to see what they are doing – they are protecting their income stream off voice traffic. Hardly surprising, if they are allowed to get away with it.

This is in fact partly why people who want network neutrality to be law get so worked up about the whole topic – if any carrier can start blocking or slowing down competitors data for purely competitive reasons the only result of that is serious damage to usability for the end users and increased costs all round.

The answer is ‘yes’, and in LTE this is what is supposed to happen. Voice calls in LTE basically become VOIP, but using an internal VOIP system.

As for why it’s not like that now, that’s because mobile data has been built on top of a legacy system that treats voice in a distinctly different way from data to give the kind of voice service most of us expect (specifically low latency). The developments envisaged for LTE should give this low latency. Note that even so, it seems likely that voice would be handled differently from other sorts of data in LTE, because the requirements for voice are different from the requirements for (say) surfing. Nowadays voice uses a very low data rate – it can be lower than 10 kbit/s. With data we’re typically looking for higher rates than that, but can usually tolerate a higher latency. These days mobile data uses various classifications for the type of data and treats them differently. Data isn’t all equal. Crucially, for the operators, voice is much more lucrative per bit than mobile broadband.

Ben’s got it right: carriers should just provide a data pipe and consider everything bits.

And are you also calling for an AT&T boycott, since they, too, are protecting their voice minute revenue?