UMA Softphone from Vitendo

Vitendo Systems, a company that has its headquarters in Newport Beach, California, is one of the leader developers that delivers products and technology with the goal of accelerating the deployment of Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC) based services.

Today, they announced the releasing of their vFone 4.0. This is basically the first UMA-based Softphone for PC applications. Clearly, the UMA technology is not something that everybody is familiar with. The UMA or the Unlicensed Mobile Access is the key component of the FMC strategy for cellular operators around the world.

UMA will allow any mobile operators to extend their services over the Internet, by using the already existing broadband and WiFi infrastructure. These infrastructures have already been available almost everywhere worldwide, and wider coverage or new hotspots appear daily.

The vFone 4.0 will work with the familiar look and features of a cellphone, but will allow any end user to make and receive calls and to send and receive SMS from their laptops or desktops, by keeping their unique identity on the network.

The softphone is standard compliant, offers an easy-to-use suite of GSM and IPSec protocols and it insures worldwide interoperability with existing UMA deployments. The patent-pending zero architecture installed will allow one to have the "on-the-go" deployments on a USB flash drive and SIM card holders, high-quality voice engine and also some customizable skins for user interface.

For now, the vFone 4.0 is compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

"In the battle for capturing the indoor traffic, we believe that FMC-enabled cellular operators are in a perfect position to capture an increased share of the customers total monthly spend and start generating new revenue based on convergence. The UMA Softphone is a perfect platform to accelerate any FMC deployment and allow cellular operators to compete with peer-to-peer offerings that will stay 'unconverged' for the foreseeable future", said Bernard Debbasch, Vitendo's President and CEO.