Tel Aviv---- June 28...... UbiFone, a global VOIP solutions provider today launched MoVoIP (Mobile Voice over Internet Protocol). This much anticipated turn-key solution connects mobile phone users to Internet telephony without the need to have a PC turned on or connected to the internet making MoVoIP a breakthrough application.

"UbiFone's MoVoIP solution connects its users via a portable plug and play device which acts as a ‘local base station' that the user calls into from their mobile phone," said Samuel Kfir-El, UbiFone executive agent for the US, Canada, South America, Brazil, Argentina, Europe, Holland, France, Russia, Poland, UK, Italy, Spain, Africa, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, India, Korea, China, Singapore, Japan, Australia and Asia.
"The ‘base station' is permanently connected to the Internet and when the base receives a call from the mobile or fixed line user it opens up a UbiFone VOIP line. The VOIP line then allows the user to call other UbiFone users for free and / or make calls to any PSTN or mobile phone in the world at UbiFone's super low rates."

The ‘base station' is a pre-configured adapter that comes complete with a personal UbiFone account which allows the purchaser to take it out of the box and start making calls immediately. The adapter eliminates the need to use a computer to connect to a VOIP phone line as it is connected directly to the internet and is not dependent on your PC been turned on, which is just one of the challenges with other solutions available in the market place today.

“Users of existing VOIP services need to physically sit in front of their PC's, have a Wi-Fi phone or an IP Phone connected to their Internet cable to make IP calls,” says Carlos H. Oestby , President and Co-Founder of UbiFone. “While these solutions are good and have a place, they are also restrictive. MoVoIP offers flexibility with less boundaries and that leads to enormous market potential for our MoVoIP technology and solutions.”

UbiFone's MoVoIP solutions incorporate a wide range of creative features and capabilities designed to enhance the end user experience when MoVoIP- ing including: forwarding your incoming UbiFone calls to any landline or a mobile phone, forwarding your landline or mobile phone number to your Ubi Virtual Number and connecting to your landline phone allowing it to make PSTN and IP phone calls.

“UbiFone is focused on providing its members with the freedom to make Internet phone calls from multiple devices, wherever and whenever they desire, free (among members) and at the lowest possible rates. We are very excited to bring MoVoIP to the world as we can see many mobile phone users utilizing this new technology which in turn will force mobile phone operators to reconsider their international billing strategies” says John E. Acland, CEO and Co-Founder of UbiFone.

“VOIP is changing the way people make phone calls from the home PC, MoVoIP goes further by revolutionizing the way people make calls from their mobile phones.”

UbiFone offers affordable and cheap customer packages starting from as little as $9.95 USD which includes $5 in air time and a one time set-up fee of $4.95. Users can then top up their accounts as and when they need to make calls to cellular / mobile and fixed landline phones, in addition to also enjoying free and unlimited incoming and outgoing calls to other UbiFone users with call forwarding capabilities and no monthly charges.

"Unfortunately, essentially all the totally free PC to phone services have disappeared but Ubifone does offer free Internet phone service for its members," said Kfir-El. "Free calling from one PC to another on the Internet has been around for quite some time, but now you can make calls to standard telephones for free. PC to PC calling has its share of drawbacks. The person you are calling not only needs to be online they need to be running the same Internet phone software you are. Ubifone addresses this problem with its MoVoIP."

"The sound quality of your call was dependent on your connection speed and the other person's connection speed. If the connection is slow or there is a lot of traffic at just one end it may be impossible to hold a conversation. On the other hand when you use Ubifone that allows you to initiate your Internet phone call from your PC but call standard telephones you are the only one that needs a special setup," said Kfir-El.

Internet phone services let you communicate in a number of ways. You can make an Internet phone call from one PC to another by dialing the Internet Protocol address of your friend's computer. The software lets you type in the digits of the IP address, and you start talking.

After years of unfulfilled hype, Ubifone is offering free and low cost Internet telephone calls, in which voice data from phone calls is broken up into packets and sent across the Internet. In response, more individuals and companies have begun using the technology.

The Yankee Group, a market research firm, predicts rapid growth in the US Internet telephony market. A recent report by the Yankee Group, a market research firm, predicts the US consumer Internet telephony market will explode from 130,000 subscribers at the end of 2003 to 17.5 million subscribers in 2008.

Now, Ubifone is offering wireless Internet telephony, which adds convenience by letting users make Internet calls from their mobile phones via IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) wireless LAN and third-generation (3G) cellular technologies. With wireless-phone usage outstripping wired-phone usage, this represents a potentially huge market for developers, explained Mareca Hatler, research director with ON World, a wireless-technology consultancy.

As is the case with its wired Internet telephony, wireless Internet telephony is less expensive than regular mobile telephony because carriers can use the existing Internet, rather than build a new infrastructure, to route calls. In addition, Internet telephony is not subject to the regulation and fees that governments impose on traditional telephony. Using the Internet enables wireless telephony to offer good reception indoors, which is not always the case with traditional cellular service. However, despite rosy marketplace-growth projections, Internet telephony faces several important concerns, particularly power usage, security, and quality of service (QoS).

In many ways, wireless Internet telephony is an adaptation of traditional wireline IP telephony, as the "Internet Telephony 101" sidebar explains. Wireless IP telephony works primarily with Wi-Fi, which it uses to access the Internet. However, many Internet calls do not travel only over Wi-Fi networks. For example, a call from a user on a Wi-Fi network to someone using a traditional wireline or mobile phone at some point will be routed over the traditional wired or cellular phone network. Some systems provide wireless service only via Wi-Fi.

However, several companies, including Motorola, are developing phones that would use cellular technology for the parts of calls that travel over cellular networks and Wi-Fi for those parts that travel over the Internet. Wi-Fi In Wi-Fi Internet telephony, vendors equip a mobile handset with an IEEE 802.11 radio. The phones, when within range of a Wi-Fi access point, use IEEE 802.11 to connect to the Internet, over which they can then transmit voice traffic. There are several Wi-Fi standards. IEEE 802.11b, the first popular Wi-Fi standard, has a theoretical maximum data rate of 11 Mbits per second using the 2.4-GHz frequency band. IEEE 802.11a has a theoretical maximum rate of 54 Mbps using the 5-GHz band. IEEE 802.11g offers a faster speed and compatiblity with the large installed base of IEEE 802.11b systems because it also uses the 2.4-GHz band.

Wi-Fi works with telephony by providing a wireless channel to the Internet. Wi-Fi converts voice and other data into radio signals that can be transmitted wirelessly. Internet-connected receivers then convert the radio signals into conventional data traffic that can be transmitted via the Internet or another network. There are a growing number of Wi-Fi-enabled networks and IEEE 802.11 phones from manufacturers such as Cisco Systems and Symbol Technologies, said Allen Nogee, principal analyst for wireless technology with In-Stat/MDR, a market research firm. Companies such as Agere Systems, Broadcom, and Texas Instruments (TI) are beginning to release Wi-Fi-based Internet telephony chips, which have embedded functionality formerly provided by both software and hardware, said Allen.

Company analyst Norm Bogen predicted the number of Wi-Fi/cellular handsets used globally will grow from about 1 million in 2005 to more than 100 million in 2008. However, ON World's Hatler said, many cellular service providers may not want to cooperate out of fear they will lose revenue to Wi-Fi carriers.

The survey of business Internet telephony users found that 10 percent of respondents are already working with the wireless technology, and 48 percent are considering implementing it.

Currently, the biggest Internet telephony opportunities are in businesses such as healthcare, education, retail warehousing and distribution, and manufacturing, which already have established Wi-Fi networks over which they could run Internet telephony, explained In-Stat/MDR's Bogen. The real commercial value, ON World's Hatler added, will come when wireless Internet phones can integrate with PBX systems and thus become more useful to companies. However, she added, the usefulness of voice over Wi-Fi technology will depend on the continued growth of the wireless LAN infrastructure—including access points, gateways, routers, and clients such as laptops, PDAs, and phones—in the enterprise and residences.

About a two years ago, Internet or IP telephony - the technology that enables voice calls to be routed over data networks - was mostly dismissed as an unviable business option. Handicapped by low speech quality and complexity, it was seen as little more than a hobby for computer "nerds" or a way for impoverished students to make cheap calls home. Now, spurred by privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation in the telecoms industry and the emergence of a new breed of "data-centric" network operators such as Qwest, IDT and Delta3, IP telephony is set to enter the mainstream as a low-cost alternative to traditional telephone services.

"These are exciting times for IP telephony," says Mark Purdom of Ascend, the communications network equipment specialist. But like most other industry insiders, he believes that while consumer Internet telephony applications grab most of the headlines, it will be corporate demand for IP services that will ultimately drive IP telephony - not least because most large companies already have dedicated data lines or virtual private networks.

In the US, the market for IP telephony services is expected to be worth about $30-million this year, but by 2004, annual spending on Internet phone calls will rocket to $2-billion, or more than 4% of US long-distance telephone revenues, according to Forrester Research, a market research group. "Internet telephony is about to get respectable," says Christopher Mines, a telecoms analyst with Forrester. Another study, by Frost & Sullivan, predicts that the total IP telephony equipment market will show compound annual growth of nearly 150% for the next few years, reaching $1.89-billion by 2001.

Most analysts think it unlikely that IP telephony will replace the traditional voice networks in the foreseeable future. But there is no doubt that IP telephony is already creating dramatic changes in the traditional telecoms industry. IP telephony represents the convergence of circuit-switched networks, such as the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN) and leased lines, with packet-switched networks, such as the Internet or intranets, local area networks and other data communications technologies. Instead of being handled as an analogue signal over the circuit-switched networks of the telephone companies, voice calls over the Internet are cut up into digital "packets", compressed, transmitted independently to their destination over the Internet and then reassembled into speech. Because these packets can be packed tightly together, they do not waste space on the silences and pauses that make up a typical conversation and make more efficient use of network bandwidth. From the user point of view an Internet telephone call costs the same, no matter how far the distance.

In addition, by treating voice as another form of data and sending it over the same network as data, IP telephony is enabling new applications that use the best characteristics of voice communications and data processing. These applications can include PC-to-PC connections, PC-to-phone connections and phone-to-phone connections. Example applications include voice over the Internet or corporate intranets, fax traffic (both real-time and store-and-forward), unified messaging via the web, web-enabled call centres, Internet call waiting and much more. Companies will seize the opportunity to cut their phone bills by using new Internet services once sound quality issues are resolved, predicts Forrester. Much of the scepticism surrounding voice over IP services reflects the limitations of the first generation of Internet telephony software, launched in 1995. But the technology underpinning IP telephony is advancing quickly.

The big breakthrough has been the introduction of "gateway servers" that link data networks to traditional telephone networks. In the gateway, analogue voice signals from a telephone are converted into digital packets based on the IP standard, or vice versa. This ability potentially poses a serious threat to traditional phone companies and it is estimated that US phone companies stand to lose $900-million a year in revenues by 2001. However, a growing number of traditional telephone companies are rising to the challenge. With IP voice traffic projected to rise to more than 60-billion minutes - or more than 30% of the total - in 2005, there is little doubt that the migration of voice to the Internet will transform the economics of telecoms services.

UbiFone is a US company based in Nevada with its management and customer support division located in Singapore, the hub of South East Asia. The company is in the process of opening another office which will be fully operational in the 3rd Quarter of 2005. UbiFone provides state of the art communications solutions to members in over 150 countries.

UbiFone's global community of members can receive and initiate calls to and from multiple devices such as PC's, MAC'S, IP Phones, Cellular/Mobiles, Fixed Landline Phones and PDA'S. The company's One World - One Community - One Number concept is catching on fast as more and more people are searching for genuine savings, reliability and flexibility with crystal clear call quality. For more information please contact Samuel Kfir-El at email: uninumber@gmail.com.

ISRAEL NEWS AGENCY