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Friends, Do you know why there is no way to check our email on blackberry through wi-fi? does it make any sense? Regards,

Because you need a carrier's BIS system to get to the Blackberry email and they don't allow direct connection over the internet. You have a couple of options:

1) Use UMA (Bold 9700 on T-Mobile supports it)
2) Use LogicMail, although this is not very well integrated into Blackberry.

To get technical, T-Mobile's infrastructure simply doesn't care where you are whenever you connect via WiFi/UMA. You get routed over an encrypted VPN connection to what appears to T-Mobile's internal network as a cell tower, which is just a dedicated cluster handling the UMA connectivity.

http://www.umatechnology.org/overview/

While I agree that they seem to have the smallest network footprint among the three or four "Major Carriers" in the US, the fact that I can use WiFi instead of the cellular network overcomes pretty much all of those concerns for me.

For example, when I'm home (in a rural part of Chester County, PA), my cell signal from T-Mobile is only around 1 bar (of 5), but as I have a WiFi network at home, it doesn't matter at all. Also, I travel overseas quite a bit, and the fact that a call from, say, France, is treated as a local call (so long as I'm connected via UMA) overcomes just about any reticence I'd have over using T-Mobile.

The real shame is that none of the other carriers seem to offer this option, and the majority of the T-Mobile phones no longer offer it either. I've stuck with my Blackberry mainly because of its UMA compatibility. If any of the Android phones (notably the Nexus One) or the iPhone offered this, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

If you get a Blackberry from T-Mobile, it will happily connect via Wifi. The technology is called UMA:
http://www.umatechnology.org/overview/

They may have other phones that do it as well. I don't know.

No femtocell host is required.

Yeah, cell coverage is weak in my basement, but UMA (unlicensed mobile access - WiFi in my case) coverage at my house is great on every floor. So, my Blackberry is happy to use that instead.

Do you actually know what UMA is? I have absolutely no idea why this complete confusion of ideas keeps coming up. I've even read the once excellent Ars Technica claim UMA is something carriers are scared of. Right now, the only major carriers that might be scared of it in the US are Verizon and Sprint. Because they can't use it. It's a GSM technology.

UMA does not cut into an operator's revenue stream. It frees up revenue because the operator is not having to put up towers to get coverage and capacity for every single building in the world. If YOU, the user, save money, it'll only be because the operator is giving you discounts for using UMA, not because you're sticking it to the man by using it, somehow bypassing the carrier. Far from it. You're using the carrier either way.

UMA is not "I can bypass the cellphone company to make free calls", it's "I can route the last mile of my calls through either the radio waves to a tower or via the Internet to a gateway at my carrier, either way getting to my carrier who'll then route the call as necessary." It's a great technology, but what makes it great is that it means that people can make coverage where they currently have blackspots.

What's confused some people is they've read all this crap about Skype phones, and think that UMA is this. It isn't. It's GSM routed over the Internet. Skype phones are something else entirely.

Other people are confused because they've heard it's VoIP. VoIP does not mean "Cheap ways to bypass the phone companies", it's a just a name given to any form of two-way voice traffic routed over IP packets. Just because using Vonage over cable is "sticking it" to AT&T&T doesn't mean that all forms of VoIP are.

This is why T-Mobile and Cingular are members of the UMA consortium and are planning to roll it out here in the US. Yes, they are. Yes, they've made announcements to that effect. It may make calls cheaper. More importantly though it'll make calling more reliable. No more blackspots in the kitchen. Nice.

Go to http://www.umatechnology.org/

UMA is the technology that supports WiFi cellular voice. A processing unit (known as a UNC) must be added to the cellular operator's network. The UNC bridges the WiFi-carried voice into the cellular network.

Off-topic, and very slightly tongue-in-cheek:

Although telcos, in the US and elsewhere, suck royal dick 24/7, having the recipient pay for incoming calls turns out to have advantages, rooted in the fact that it liberates you from the real telco {mono|oligo}poly: The PSTN numbering cartel.

Consider something like UMA, only turned inside-out: Instead of making your mobile number your "public" number, you use your SIP/IAX endpoint for that instead. Since a lot of your customers/friends/colleagues etc still use the PSTN, you give it a nice PSTN proxy through a VoIP operator that supports this.

When you're out of the house/office your SIP endpoint is forwarded to your mobile number. You can do that for zero incremental cost - to the original caller - in the US because you'll be paying the termination fees through your incoming airtime.

Add the advent of WiFi-capable mobiles and the proliferation of free hotspots in the places you're likely to use your mobile (home-work-starbucks-mall) and you have a very juicy, extremely low barrier-to-entry lever over the mobile operators.

In the rest of the world this would not be possible because the initiator of the mobile leg of the call (your asterisk box/subscription service) will have to pay the high (captive market, fun fun fun!) termination fees the mobile operator charges. This is where not paying for incoming airtime works against you: Cost is not the only problem here; the major problem is that this makes you have to buy [or subscribe to someone who buys] into the PSTN numbering cartel in order to get a number with a high enough termination "cushion" to cover the cost. The barrier to entry has been somewhat safely defended...

Of course, in the US and elsewhere, the operators are going to do everything they can to stop all this from happening. Some of it may even be meaningful, like offering decent UMA rates (don't hold your breath, this sounds too much like competition). When WiFi mobiles get introduced in the US I expect to get a laugh from their T&Cs and general brain-dead-ness when they try to both sell and cripple WiFi at the same time :-)

This has a basic description of the technology: http://www.umatechnology.org/technology/

Mobile phones will really start to work for us when they can use any of the radio networks available, handing off seamlessly. UMA is the mobile telco's 3G coopt of WiFi. SCCAN is the WiFi coopt of 3G. And the IEEE's 802.11e makes WiFi itself suitable for heating up spots in the mobile convergence mix. There's even Bluetooth routes to global telephony. It'll take a few years to work at all, but we're looking at the ream form of the emerging mobile platform.

Until radio Internet access forms an uninterrupted coverage area, Internet radio will be relocatable, not truly "mobile". Like the difference between a "luggable" KayPro PC and a Palm Pilot, only convenient mobility will be palatable to the masses (not just geeks, early adopters, and scattered specialists). That limitation means not only that cost will remain prohibitive until industrial scales are marketable, but that the network won't really be populated enough to really be social - except as an echo chamber of the same hackers and antisocial worker drones we've already got on Slashdot ;). That might have been better for Usenet, before AOL piped into the Internet, but the path to riches and humanization runs right through the washed masses.

WiFi (and its descendants) will be just the place to settle down, or breathe free. But hotspots will be spotty for some time, as our society's P2P buildout continues inexorably, but unplanned. The way this environment will reach a basic mobility platform includes interspot coverage by barely-adequate 3G "phone" networks, with roaming among them and hotspots, interchangeably. Motorola has announced a WLAN/GSM roamer due by Q32005. BT promises a WiFi/GSM "phone" by Q42005, and is launching a Bluetooth/GSM project. These vendors are trying to both extend cell/PCS service to enterprise WLANs (SCCAN), and roam VoWLAN connections to cell/PCS networks (UMA). And the IEEE already has a new "WiFi" descendant, WMM, that promises better roaming and QoS over the WLANs, for seamless telephony interop.

The upshot for devices like this cute little inFusion Internet radio is popularity well beyond shoppers at ThinkGeek. Which bigger global market means cheaper devices, easier to use, and more jobs for geeks. But it also means a bigger audience for content, within which niche producers can find supporting consumer scale for even the least popular content. So the leveled multimedia playing field can support people who tie other people together across the globe. Let's get it on!

I wonder when the WiFi spec will include transparent roaming by default. I'd have some kind of unique issuer::id certificate, and a set of "rate plans" I'd be willing to accept (eg. "$0.01:MB", or "$0.05:minute 11AM-6PM; $0.02:minute 6PM-11AM"). I might have a whole keyring of certificates, some of which are per-franchise, like Panera Bread, but the most successful of which are aggregations. Like Cirrus or NYCE login networks for ATMs. Then people could fill in hotspot gaps with their own hotspots, financing their investment, even if the hotspot was for their own ongoing use. And the difference between hotspots and continuous coverage would totally change mobile computing.

There's already a spec for GSM, UMA, but where's the actual tech and businesses for just WiFi, which could have more accurate market economics?

Er, UMA doesn't seem to have 2 competing coalitions, but rather one coalitition of surprisingly cooperative competitors, joining together to compete with WiFi. Unless you've heard of some trouble in paradise?

This will all come together when we have UMA phones. UMA lets a voice call roam between WiFi and 3G networks seamlessly, like moving between cells on the same network. It might even let a call roam between two overlapping 3G networks, like Cingular and T-Mobile, depending on which one has a cheaper or better signal at the moment. Then our smartphones can be really smart, choosing which network to access based on our own rules (maybe downloaded from a phone blog).

Actually it makes a lot of sense to use VoIP on a mobile if the mobile is dual-mode WiFi and GSM. Why put WiFi on a mobile? Well from a VoIP point of view, WiFi, although it has small cells can actually fill in gaps that GSM doesn't cover very well, especially in-building coverage at 1900MHz (US) either at home or the office. This would essentially extend the carrier's network for free (for them). Although there a lot of technical hurdles to overcome IMO, it looks like Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) is coming to a phone near you.