Daily Yomiuri Online carries news of a group of telephone scammers in Tokyo brought to book who were using Voice over IP telephony services as part of their operation.

I want to point out here that, like most other comminication technologies, VoIP can be used by criminals. That doesn’t make VoIP a ‘criminals tool’ or any such thing but those who break the law are often liable to utilise legitimate tools for nefarious purposes.

While the article doesn’t actually detail what the nature of the scam was, it is noted that the scammers were using VoIP to ‘conceal’ their true location. They used a VoIP service through NTT docomo’s network which allowed them to place calls remotely as if they were originating from Tokyo’s ’03′ area code.

Ultimately, the scammers were not very sophisticated and were traced through NTT docomo. It does however bring to attention the fact that more advanced scammers could operate from outside the country in which the scam is being perpetrated and there ought to be future work on the best methods for securing VoIP networks against this sort of criminal activity.

Godzilla-like Japanese telco NTT DoCoMo has reared up from Tokyo bay to offer it’s customers wireless telecoms connectivity for their mobile handsets via their home broadband.

DoCoMo FOMA handsets which have WiFi connectivity will be able to utilise a new service called Home U which allows them to make their normal telephone connections via their home broadband rather than the cellular network. This will allow for free calls between Home U user when they are in their own residence. It will also allow handsets to download large volumes of data such as video at up to 54Mbps – this is a limitation of the WiFi technology, in fiber to the home areas, the actual speed of Japanese broadband is often 100Mbps.

gigaom.com carries word that the big global Telcos such as AT&T, British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, NTT etc could be working together to create a ‘Skype rival’ for 2009.

No real detail or grit is given on the product although I would hope that it would be a SIP or at least standards-based system unlike Skype which is uses a proprietary method.

The service is said to be designed to ultimately be available for mobile devices with 3G or 4G connections so presumably the model would be direct connection or client/server connection rather than Skype’s P2P routing model.

Some more detail over in Om Malik’s article.