Call Me!

It has been several years now since I was actively working with mobile network operators (MNOs). And almost six years since I called Presence the mobile killer application. Yet is is amazing how little the MNOs have been doing to improve the call setup process.

We still dial numbers, not people or places and we still dial blind. Not knowing whether the other party is able to pick up the call. With everybody carrying a smart computer (a teleputer) in their pockets and almost everybody connected over ultra high speed 4G networks and everybody doing almost everything in the cloud, for voice calls we still dial blind. A number, the green call button and wait... for the other party to send us a busy tone, or pick the call up just to tell she will call back after the meeting ends. The smart ones use "reject the call with a text message" option present on some devices.

Amazing!

Or is it?

Sad indeed. MNOs did so little to improve the call setup. For me the best time for people to call me is when I sit in a car stuck in a traffic jam. I would love to signal the "call me now if you want!" status message. But there is no such option.

Even worse, when the car moves and I am on the call and I happen to enter a congested cell, the call is dropped. And then I try to call back the other party while she is calling me back too and the calls collide and we cannot connect. Yes, the network knows A is calling B and B is calling A at the same time, and instead of connecting them, signals busy both ways. I understood this was a problem 20 years ago. But today? There is something fundamentally wrong with the voice networks. They have fallen behind everything else.

There is even not very much done on the mobile operating systems either to improve the situation. When I am active on a Skype call on my smartphone, the GSM call still rings. Shouldn't the iOS or Android manage such conflicts?

The other day there was a hope called IMS. It has never delivered. Is there any initiative today to solve such basic problem?