Voice Calls from Any Mobile Device – It’s Happening Now

Like most kids, my children love to call their grandparents and tell them about what is happening at school. We are lucky that we have a great home POTS voice service through our local telephone company. My kids are growing up quickly, and I anticipate that they will want to eventually call from whatever device is in their hands. That could be my cell phone or the regular ‘land line’ home phone. Or what if my son wants to use my Kindle or an iPod touch to make the call? These devices are typically not used for voice calls, only for data applications. Many of them only have Wi-Fi, and right now cannot make voice over Wi-Fi calls without a number of new developments on the device.

The great news is that there are many developments in the Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) space to get us closer to that vision. Some of those new developments are being shown this week at Mobile World Congress. Companies know that in order to have a great VoWi-Fi experience for all users, the network and device must be ready to enforce the right policy to accommodate the right Quality of Service experience for a smooth call.

Cisco and Chemring have partnered together to demonstrate the ability to use the on-device policy management from Chemring, combined with the network-based Cisco ePDG (Evolved Packet Data Gateway), and Cisco Policy Suite for Service Providers, to allow non-SIM devices to make voice calls over Wi-Fi. They are demonstrating this capability in their booth in Hall 7 at Mobile World Congress.

It is an exciting development to take advantage of the fact that my kids will soon be able to make calls from my laptop, my tablet, even my Kindle. Check out the demonstration and learn more about these developments at the Chemring press release.

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