There are millions of people in the Middle Eastern countries such as UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain who have families back home in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and need to communicate with them on a regular basis. Unfortunately, the regular calling rates from the Middle East to these countries are prohibitively high. Naturally, these people look towards VoIP services to make calls at affordable rates but the ISPs in the Middle Eastern countries actively block all VoIP communication.
At Spokn, we have been working hard to come up with a solution that works well for callers from the Middle East, most of whom are in Dubai. With version 3.0.0 of the Spokn Windows dialer, we’ve finally cracked the problem and we’re calling this technology O-VoIP, short for “Obfuscated VoIP”. Essentially, we make the VoIP traffic look different so that the rules that the ISPs have implemented on their firewalls don’t catch our VoIP data.
Many people subscribe to expensive VPN services to make VoIP calls. But in countries like Oman, even VPN connections are blocked. Also, making VoIP calls through a VPN will result in worse voice quality since the data has to go through yet another network, adding latency and possibly, packet drops.
We are rolling out our O-VoIP technology on all our existing clients. The first one out will be our new Android dialer that should be available next week. The iPhone dialer will follow soon after.
Some customers have reported voice distortion issues with v3.0.0 of the Windows dialer – this is because their microphone volume is set too high. In the next release, we will be implementing Automatic Gain Control (AGC) so that microphone volume settings do not need to manually set.
If you haven’t tried Spokn yet, give it a shot. We’re committed to our customers in the Middle East and promise replies to all your queries within 1 business day.
