T-Mobile U.K. 'banned VoIP because of poor quality'

ZDNet UK News reports that "T-Mobile UK has claimed that voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls are too low in quality to be allowed over its data network. The mobile provider has banned the use of VoIP and IM services over its new HSDPA-enabled data cards." In a recent statement, T-Mobile said that VoIP technology "is not yet of a consistent or high enough level of quality to offer a good customer experience on the T-Mobile network. This situation may change in the future, but for now we believe it is in the best interests of our customers to restrict the use of VoIP technology."

John Delaney at Ovum said T-Mobile’s decision was "not entirely illegitimate. Technical reasons make it difficult to offer consistent services. The main reason operators are concerned about VoIP over their 3G networks is not so much a worry about substitution of calls and call revenues, but degrading the performance of the network for other users."

Margaret Hopkins at Analysys disagreed and said, "It’s not really real-time packets that hog bandwidth, it’s file transfer protocols such as TCP. I’m not saying you can be sure of perfect quality on a VoIP network, but it seems to me that’s not the main motivation for T-Mobile’s decision. This looks to me like they don’t want VoIP to affect their voice revenues."