Company profile: Truphone

• Tags:
• Cambridge Silicon Radio,
• James Tagg,
• VoIP

David Meyer ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 05 Apr 2007 09:55 BST

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...roaming deals with The Cloud and the free-hotspot.com network to let users connect while out and about. Tagg indicates that a similar deal with BT could be on the cards for its network of Openzone hotspots, but prices are still being negotiated.

"Within a year we will launch in about 14 European countries on a fairly low-key basis and then expand from there," says Tagg, adding: "The benefit of being internet-based is you can start in a lot of countries."

Tagg thinks that Truphone's client is set apart from its rivals by its ease of use. "Doing Wi-Fi is surprisingly hard to do right," he says. "The benefit is that we have been doing it for a long time. We hope the reason you use us is that we do it best."

"With the vast majority of VoIP clients, you have to feed all the parameters into the smartphone. The last time we checked, [a typical installation] took 270 key clicks. With Truphone it takes six key clicks, all of which are 'yes'."

Truphone also has plans to expand, and not just through interoperability agreements like the one recently inked with Google Talk. In the next quarter, the company will branch out beyond its current web-only strategy into retail stores, and it will soon offer its own SIM cards (and possibly handsets), although its operator partner in this venture has still not been announced.

In September, once its voice and SMS capabilities are "solid" enough, Truphone will start offering push-email for its business customers, together with "music and fun" for the consumer. Tagg is also keeping an eye on the long-range technology WiMax, which he thinks could offer great potential if used in conjunction with Wi-Fi, but he estimates that it will be at least two years before WiMax-native phones are available in any great quantity.

The big question, of course, is where the mobile industry will end up once companies like Truphone have taken a slice of the pie. "Given the huge number of cell phones and users, I don't see any prospect of wiping out the cellular operators," concedes Tagg, "But I am amazed how few services are provided on cellular phones. That's where the game is."

"If you think disposable income is going up, it is prospectively a very rosy world for the mobile industry," Tagg continues. "Cellular operators can go one of two ways. They can be a bitpipe and have a smallish number of staff and a very efficient network, or they can provide services and entertainment and not care about the network." He cites Virgin Mobile — a "mobile virtual network operator" (MVNO), which resells T-Mobile's connectivity — as an example of how to adopt the latter strategy, but claims that he does not think one strategy is necessarily "smarter than the other".

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