Making a good call

Dublin-based company Cicero Networks is at the cutting edge of new developments in mobile phone technology, writes Karlin Lillington

It's been a fine year for Cicero Networks, the Dublin-based company which creates software that enables telecommunications operators to offer voice-over internet protocol (Voip) over mobile phones.

This means users can make telephone calls via a wireless internet connection on their mobile phone.

Cicero was one of only 47 companies chosen by the World Economic Forum for the prestigious Technology Pioneer 2007 designation. Then technology magazine Red Herring selected it for its list of the top 100 most promising European technology companies for 2007.

And, for the third consecutive year, it was listed as a Pulver 100 company - the internet protocol (IP) telecommunications industry's listing of the most promising companies.

Not bad for a company that, as chief executive Ross Brennan says, "wrote out its first line of code in January 2002".

The company began with three people and now employs about two dozen.

Since launching its Softphone software two years ago - which lets a mobile handset make calls over WiFi wireless networks - Cicero has been putting together an impressive list of partnerships with operators and handset manufacturers. It is now seen as one of a handful of companies at the forefront of the convergence that is beginning to happen between mobile devices and fixed networks.

Cicero's software does two things. First, its mobile software becomes the dialler on a mobile handset, and it will route a call either over WiFi - if a wireless network is accessible - or else over the regular mobile network (using the WiFi network is generally the cheapest option for the user; this is also useful for a mobile operator as it offloads traffic from the mobile network).

The software then constantly monitors the available networks and, if the WiFi network begins to drop out, it hands over the call to the regular mobile network.

The idea, according to Brennan, is for the entire operation to be invisible to both the phone user and the network operator.

Brennan says the software is "closely analogous" to Skype's software for making Voip calls over the internet. But whereas Skype offers Voip calls as an application, Cicero offers Voip calls as a service, he says.

Making Voip calls over mobile phones is still very much a cutting-edge area, with few using WiFi for mobile calls. Another hindrance for the software is that the pricing model for public WiFi access is still better-suited to data usage rather than Voip calls, Brennan says.

But while using Voip for data transfer on handsets is even more out on the edge of innovation than using it for voice calls, data transfer such as video over Voip is coming too.

"Our focus is primarily voice and messaging to date, but our near-term roadmap adds in things like video," Brennan says.

But are mobile operators actually looking at adding in Voip video? There is not yet strong demand from operators for this, admits Brennan, but he says operators would view Cicero as a cutting-edge company and, even if they are not yet adopting a service, "it's important for them to see we're in that area".

Cicero is concentrating on the European market because it can be assumed that mobile phone users almost always have a cellular signal, Brennan says. By contrast, in the US, the country is much larger and vast areas have either no mobile coverage or poor coverage.

In addition, the US networks use a signal frequency that does not penetrate buildings very well, creating additional challenges to introducing Voip handsets. "Europe is the place where handset innovation is happening," he says.

The dual-mode phone handsets needed for handling both WiFi and traditional mobile telephony are just beginning to come on to the market from manufacturers such as Nokia, Brennan says. Although such handsets are currently at the high end of the market, before long WiFi capability will become the norm on many models, he predicts.

Next, the company will be looking at the US and Asia, but Brennan expects that it will enter those markets through its handset and operator partners rather than actively pursuing them alone.

Brennan says Cicero's real market is the "operator community", though in future the company may work directly with the enterprise market. For now, though, it prefers to supply the technology to carriers, who in turn sell on the services to businesses or else use the Voip software on their own networks.

"We have an open mind [ towards marketing directly to enterprises]," he says. "As the technology matures, I think we'll see a growing demand from enterprises, but very-early-stage innovations don't work well through that channel."

Cicero Networks was set up in 2002 with bootstrap funding from friends and family and some financial support from Enterprise Ireland. Since then it has taken in some additional funding, Brennan says, "but we're controlling costs and funding ourselves from our own operations".

He adds: "We're not actively seeking funding at the moment. We want to grow with the market. We're still here 5½ years later because we haven't splurged."

And why the name Cicero Networks? "I did Latin at school," Brennan says. "Cicero is widely known as a communicator - and it was a better name than Thucydides Networks."