Supermarket Retailer Tesco Plc has launched a service called ‘TalkWiFi’ that allows mobile phone users to make free and low cost VoIP calls over WiFi.
Provided in partnership with Freshtel, the service can be downloaded to Nokia’s N95,N81,E65 and E51 phones with plans to make the service available to other phone models by the end of the year.
The network works by connecting calls made while in an unrestricted WiFi to the Internet thus offering significant savings to the caller.
With TalkWiki, a call to Australia would cost just 1.5p per minute while calls to other TalkWifi customers are free of charge, even if the other user happens to be abroad.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has approved the 802.11r Wi-Fi protocol, which allows Wi-Fi enabled devices to pass between WLAN access points more quickly.
The new standard aims to improve the quality and security of VoIP services. With existing protocols, swapping from one access point to another takes considerable amount of time.
The 802.11r standard, also known as Fast Basic Service Set Transition, takes less than 50 milliseconds to enable the security authentication of the service, during the course of switching over. This is less than half the time taken by existing standards.
The 802.11r standard was developed in 2004 and approval for publishing the final draft of the standard was given by the 802.11r task group in January.
