iCall has a closed beta of their system for the iPhone in work.

iCall allows you to route your incoming cellular network calls to your iPhone via VoIP when you are connected to a WiFi hotspot. You can also send and receive VoIP calls over WiFi.

Watch the demonstration video for more information.

Blonde 2.0 for Mashables.com brings us news that mobile p2p VoIP provider fring has released it’s API for third party developers.

This will enable others to develop new applications and add-ons for the fring platform.

The fring platform supports mobile devices such as the Symbian Series 60, Sony Ericsson UIQ, Windows Mobile 5 & 6 and the iPhone.

As a network, fring also integrates with Skype, AIM, Twitter, Google Talk and the industry standard SIP protocol.

US Senate bill HR 3043 (New and Emerging Technologies 911 Improvement Act of 2008) has been passed into law and requires traditional telephone companies to make available access to 911 services for Voice over IP operators.

An article at VoIP Weblog suggest that the old telcos may have actually been blocking access to 911 for some VoIP operators. Smithonvoip is similarly aghast that 911 services which exist to provide access to emergency services could have been blocked.

Andy Abramson for VoIP Watch has written an article on the just released Skype 4.0 Beta.

Andy makes a point that the new Video-oriented interface for Skype 4.0 lends itself to rich-media contextual advertising being piped to the client while they make calls.

Perhaps, in future, you may find yourself watching an advert before you can place a video call.

You can download the Skype 4.0 Beta for windows but a note in Andy’s article references Jim Courtney for Skype Journal saying you should only install it on a spare machine.

An article in New Scientist reports that ISP’s intentions to use a compression technique to reduce the bandwidth required for VoIP calls could pose a significant eavesdropping threat to users.

The issue lies in the way the ‘sounds’ of a conversation are compressed.

…the sampling rate is kept high for long complex sounds like “ow”, but cut down for simple consonants like “c”. This variable method saves on bandwidth, while maintaining sound quality.

Simply by analysing the encrypted stream for the difference between the sizes of the packets, researchers at John Hopkins university say they can identify entire words with a high degree of accuracy.

The John Hopkins team hope that they have caught this threat in time but I think it will take a good deal of shouting about it for the ISPs to take notice and change their planned deployments.