A Stateless IP Phone In The Works From AT&T

Boli writes: "Ran across this broadband phone today. It appears to be based on the Virtual Network Computing work done at AT&T Labs Cambridge. The most interesting feature is that all apps run on a server while the phone is only a display and I/O device. This opens the possibility for a variety of devices to display the same stuff. Imagine transferring a call from the phone to your browser display to paste a graphics file, then transfer again to a cordless. The VNC tools are free (as-in-beer) today." AT&T says they even have a working wireless prototype working in their building. (And VNC is Free as in GPL as well, according to their front page.) How long till conventional phones are obsolete?

Comments

Obsolete?

[terri rolle]

How long till conventional phones are obsolete?

Given how little conventional telephones have changed over the past century, how we still use them by the millions, and how we have so many technological and regulatory problems when adopting new communications technologies, I wouldn't be holding my breath waiting for them to become obsolete. No matter what new technologies come down the pike.

Simple IP-Based Telephony

[waldoj]

I'm a bit baffled why nobody has unveiled basic IP-based telephony. A regular ol' telephone that simply has an Ethernet jack. Great for businesses, and fine for the small percentage of geeks like me that don't have a landline. The phone could be really quite simple -- the telephone equivalent of a computer with a TCP/IP stack, a soundcard and a speaker. I assume that it would have to be tied to a particular service (configuration information burned into the EEPROM), but fancier ones could let you specify the IP of a gateway, I guess. Then, any company with a sufficent number of POPs would be able to eliminate the bulk of long-distance costs, as the calls themselves could simply be routed over the Internet.

I can't say that the plan is flawless -- I leave such details up to much more knowledgable people than myself -- but I still think that this is a pretty basic goal for IP-based telephony, rather than this platform-specific strap-on-some-headphones kind of thing.

-Waldo

Re:Simple IP-Based Telephony

[dachshund]

Then, any company with a sufficent number of POPs would be able to eliminate the bulk of long-distance costs, as the calls themselves could simply be routed over the Internet.

One word. Latency. It'd be a great idea within a single LAN, though. My company has an expensive dedicated digital telephone network in house, and I can't imagine that it does anything that a standard Ethernet couldn't. And when low-latency QoS services are available from the backbone providers, cheap long-distance'll follow. With residential broadband QoS and a VPN, you could have an office extension in your house in no time.

What bugs me about this phone is the dumb-client design. I can picture banks of these phones lying around with blank screens because of a server crash. There's no good reason for this design, other than a futile desire to come up with a service for AT&T to sell. Some centralized storage for a group of phones to tap into, sure. A centralized network gateway to interface with POTS phone lines, that makes sense. But making the phone nothing more than a remote display is sort of silly.

If only we can find good applications

[RadioheadKid]

As stated earlier, it seems that we go through this ebb and flow of "cpu power is better in the client" and then back to "cpu power on the server is where it should be". There are good arguements for both. But with the increasingly more powerful and smaller processors, what day to day app's wouldn't the cell phones/PDA's of the near future be able to handle? I'm not sure. Granted it would be really cool if I could securely connect to my X Server and take care of something I had forgotten to do before I left work.

And I have to say the VNC screenshots are pretty cool seeing different combinations of OS A running in a virtual console on OS B. And props to AT&T (for once) for making it free...