Nokia Licenses NAT Traversal Technology for VoIP

Unlike Stefan, who doesn’t have much to say about this, I have a bit to say about Nokia licensing Eyeball’s technology for network address translation (NAT) traversal for their VoIP-enabled phones..

As someone who has fiddled a bit with the couple of Nokia phones I’ve got that support VoIP, the ability to have proper NAT traversal is absolutely essential. As it stands right now, the current phones that support VoIP, specifically the E61, E70, N80 Internet Edition, and probably some others I’m forgetting, do not have an effective mechanism for dealing with NAT that is so common in residential and business settings There is nothing you can configure on the client to deal with NAT traversal except for get on a WiFi that hands out routable IP addresses (which is extremely rare).

There are some workarounds you can employ on the server side to “work around” this. That’s exactly what TruPhone has done. I think Gizmo Project utilizes a feature specific to the N80 Internet Edition to accomplish things.  For anyone trying to use this with other services, the process for getting it to work is way too fiddly for all but the most hardcore among us.

I don’t know much about the company that Nokia decided to license this NAT traversal technology from, but anything compared to the current state of being is a much-needed improvement. The real question is: how long will it take before we start seeing this technology in Nokia phones? Will current VoIP-enabled Nokia devices have a firmware upgrade that incorporates this technology?