The case for VoIP GSM Gateways

These days it is not uncommon for a business to spend 50% or more of its telephone call costs on fixed line to mobile calls (F2M) to and from the office PBX.  More and more, it is becoming standard that customers and business contacts leave their mobile telephone numbers as their main method of being able to be contacted.  This of course makes good sense as most people always have their mobile telephones close at hand.

The problem is that business pays handsomely for this convenience.  The Telco’s charge their customers dearly for the privilege of being able being to contact people on their mobile telephones.  One of the reasons for this is that when a call is made from a fixed line to a mobile telephone the call has to go through a PSTN to mobile interconnect facility, also known as the Mobile Telephone Switching Office (MTSO).  This is an overhead that the PSTN operators have to pay for when delivering calls from fixed lines to mobile telephones.  These costs are then passed on to the fixed line customer in the form of increased call rates.  An example of this infrastructure is shown below.

The GSM Gateway alternative

Businesses with staff using the office PBX to make calls to mobile telephones now have an alternative!  The GSM gateway, also known as a Fixed Cellular Terminal (FCT) or Wireless Landline can be deployed in the telephony installation to intercept calls from the office PBX to the mobile (GSM) networks.  By installing the GSM gateway alongside the office PBX, calls to mobile telephones no longer go via the expensive PSTN to mobile interconnect, but rather straight to the mobile network as shown in the diagram below.

In this installation, F2M calls become mobile to mobile (M2M) calls.  This enables business to deliver these calls at the much more attractive M2M rates that are offered by the Mobile Network Operators (MNO’s).  By using a GSM gateway such as the 2N VoiceBlue Lite, up to 4 calls can be made to mobile telephones simultaneously.  What’s more, the VoiceBlue GSM gateway is SIM card agnostic meaning that it can take advantage of the tariffs offered by the different MNO’s mobile plans all within a single, compact unit.  The VoiceBlue GSM gateways are also capable of delivering calls from mobile telephones to PBX users (M2F) thereby affording similar cost savings in the reverse direction.  Other advantages are the ability to use the gateways to deliver Short Messages Services (SMS) to mobile telephone users.  One example is the ability of office staff to send SMS messages to mobile telephones directly from their desktops.

VoIP and GSM gateways

The 2N VoiceBlue Lite and VoiceBlue Enterprise are Voice over IP (VoIP) GSM gateways.  As the advantages of IP telephony and its benefits are being discovered by business, more and more companies are opting to replace their traditional PBX’s with IP telephony solutions.  The problem is that, until now if business wanted to deploy GSM gateways in their IP telephony environments they would have to use analogue gateways that were designed to work with traditional, analogue PBX’s.  This technology is difficult to deploy in an IP telephony environment as analogue signalling has to be converted to VoIP signalling to make it work.  This becomes cumbersome and costly as the two different technologies were never designed to work together.

The VoiceBlue Lite gateway has a pure VoIP interface using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Real Time Protocol (RTP) to enable it to talk seamlessly with an IP PBX.  SIP is fast becoming the industry standard for most IP telephony vendors and environments.  By using the native VoIP protocols in the IP telephony environment many advantages are gained than by cobbling a solution with analogue units.  See the document, “Advantages of VoiceBlue” for an outline of some of these advantages.

The VoiceBlue Enterprise gateway is capable of operating in both a SIP and H.323 environment, either at once, or simultaneously.  H.323 is an older standard for VoIP but is very stable and still used by many vendors today.  By being able to use both protocols, the VoiceBlue Enterprise is able to work in just about any IP telephony environment imaginable.  VoiceBlue Enterprise even offers a built in SIP proxy, effectively making it a “mini” IP PBX.  This makes it perfect for environments where business who wish to deploy IP telephone handsets and have the benefits of PBX functions where normal landline services are not available or are not cost effective to deploy.  Examples are building site offices, remote locations, temporary facilities, etc.

The bottom line

The case for using VoIP GSM gateways lies in their ability to dramatically reduce the F2M and M2F call costs to business.  When deployed in an IP telephony environment most businesses are able to reduce their F2M call costs by at least 50% with no reduction in call quality or user comfort.  Many are able to achieve over 60% savings.  For an indication of how much you can save using VoiceBlue GSM gateways, please try out the Savings Calculator.  It is not uncommon to achieve an ROI (Return on Investment) of 6 months or less after deploying the gateways.  In some cases it is even possible to save money on National calls, depending on the plan chosen for the SIM cards in the gateway.  The powerful LCR (Least Cost Routing) ability on the VoiceBlue gateways makes this possible.