The legal tussle between VoIP provider Truphone and mobile operator T-Mobile looks set to continue, after an interim injunction against the latter was granted on Monday.
The injunction forces T-Mobile to let its customers call numbers assigned to Truphone users. Previous attempts by T-Mobile customers to do so resulted in a recorded message telling them they had misdialled. According to Truphone, T-Mobile UK was the only operator in the world refusing to interconnect with its IP-based voice network, which operates through a soft client that can be installed on many Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones. T-Mobile's counter-argument has centred on the allegedly excessive costs that Truphone had wanted to charge for connecting calls to its network — a charge known as the termination rate.
Truphone chief executive James Tagg said on Monday that the granting of the interim injunction was "good news not only for Truphone but for every company trying to develop internet-era services and for every consumer wanting freedom of choice and lower prices". However, on Tuesday, T-Mobile hit back, with a spokesperson for the operator claiming that Truphone had not "given the full picture of what has happened with the legal case".
"What Truphone has managed to achieve is an interim injunction that we connect to them at the price we had initially proposed," said a T-Mobile spokesperson. "We were always happy to connect to Truphone at a reasonable rate and that's what is happening. The idea of painting this as us being against VoIP was not entirely accurate — it was about how much we have to pay Truphone."
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Despite not wanting to define the "commercially sensitive" figures under discussion, T-Mobile's spokesperson went on to claim that Truphone had wanted to charge the operator "the highest possible termination rate in the industry", whereas T-Mobile had proposed to pay them "the same amount as to a fixed-line operator". "Mobile operators invest billions of pounds in building mobile phone networks, and that's what connection rates are about," the spokesperson added. "We think this could be resolved without going to court."
Tagg was quick to respond, claiming that such an argument was weighted against any new entrant to the market. "They've got enormous numbers of customers and we're tiny," he told ZDNet.co.uk on Tuesday. "The issue is 'How much money per customer?' not 'Have I spent billions of pounds?'." He confirmed that Truphone would file its full case against T-Mobile with the courts on Friday, as ordered by the judge who granted the interim injunction, and maintained that T-Mobile's claims regarding the level of termination rates were incorrect.
"We set our termination rate in between the regulated rates for T-Mobile, O2 and so on, and Hutchison 3G [known in the UK as 3]," said Tagg. "We did that to avoid argument about our rates, and everyone accepted it except T-Mobile. We are happy to accept the price that they have offered in the interim while we go to [full trial]."
Tagg also criticised T-Mobile over the way it recognises Truphone's numbers, which all begin with "07" despite not being true mobile phone numbers. Because some of these numbers were originally obtained from Manx Telecom — the rest are standard UK-based mobile numbers and, therefore, unaffected — T-Mobile will not include calls to such numbers in its users' call bundles. Tagg said he did not see why this was the case, pointing out that numbers in the Isle of Man fell within the UK numbering plan, and claiming that the cost of terminating a call to those numbers was "a fraction of a penny above the cost of terminating to a [standard] UK number".
