VoIP Cell Phones Coming

bp33 writes "Wireless Newsfactor is running a story about how the wireless vendors are climbing over themselves to get Voice-Over-IP cell phones. You might ask "why bother? We already have wireless voice now." But with an open platform for wireless (Symbian, JavaPhone etc), your "voice" (er .. audio) just becomes bits that your programs can manipulate before sending."

Comments

Why IP?

[NitsujTPU]

Why do we do everything over IP? I mean, honestly, it's a good protocol and all, but it's not perfect for everything. There are already digital wireless phones, and not all of them use IP.

Why would one want to use an ATM/IP/IPX/IP network when they could just use whatever works best for that application?

I think that everyone out there wants to just use IP so they feel like they've made some sort of "internet device" when really they have just another damn device with an IP. You can always tunnel just the portions that you want over IP rather than forcing EVERY square peg into that round hole. /rant

Re:Why IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple. You have to create jobs for the hundreds of thousands of university graduates out there.

What else are you going to do with millions of electrical engineers and software engineers?

Open a curry house?

Re:Why IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we do everything over IP?

Many, many, many pieces of hardware speak IP,
and not atm, x-25, and other protocols. It's
the English language of protocols. Lotsa hardware,
cheap, well-understood, easy to get engineers.

Plus, you might have read the line "just becomes bits that your programs can manipulate before sending"
before you posted. This really sums it all up.
There's tons of software that speaks IP, and the idea
behind VoIP is to manipulate the data.

Re:Why IP?

[Istealmymusic]

IP is good for everything. I remember a chant from a while back:

IP over Everything
Everything over IP

"IP over Everything" is so passe, it refers to using IP over various layer one media, such as CAT5, Fiber, Token Ring, and copper wire. Seems obvious.

So now that we have IP over everything, why not put all our higher-level devices over IP? Seems like a logical extension, since all the ISO layers below are over IP.

And no, IP is not a square peg in a round hole. Moore's law isn't working for bandwidth. Like it or not, there is not enough economic demand for bandwidth, or otherwise all the dark fiber would be lit up. And its not being lit up. Personally, I think the obsession with everything over IP is driven by simple economics.

Do everything over IP, and bandwidth will be demanded, and dark fiber around the world will be used, bandwidth will be sold and resold, and the remarket for IP bandwidth will be virgin once again.

There was an article in Wired this month about this very subject, for your information.

Re:Why IP?

[doc_side]

This sort of reminds me of a time i was at a computer con, and a guy gave a speech about how phone networks work. All the people in the room were having brain hemorages trying to look at it all in terms of tcp/ip. Finally the guy sorta said,

"...look the whole damn world doesn't run tcp/ip over ethernet, get over it..."

ever since this brick up side the head, I see communications networks in a new light. I mean, IP has its place, but more agree with you than not, that IP may not be the best tool for every job.

Re:Why IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, read the link. It says they want software to munge the data. The software needs IP, unless you wanna write something new and buggy.

Read before posting. I smell a karma smackdown comin'

Re:Why IP?

[s20451]

I remember a chant from a while back:

Actually it wasn't so long ago that ATM was the killer protocol, and people were talking about "IP over ATM". It has a lot going for it, too, like quality of service guarantees, but I guess the idea of shelling out six figures to Cisco for switches just wasn't appealing. IP is a dog of a protocol, but it's cheap to implement, which seems to be thie important thing.

Re:Why IP?

[NitsujTPU]

I'm a software engineer, and I asked the question.

Re:Why IP?

[phorm]

For services currently using POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) or related, VoIP can be a heckofa lot cheaper on long distance charges.

Re:Why IP?

[doc_side]

"IP over Everything" is so passe, it refers to using IP over various layer one media, such as CAT5, Fiber, Token Ring, and copper wire. Seems obvious.

... humm, iirc, I dont think those are all osi layer one. copper wire by itself might be, cat 5 might be, fiber might be, but i dont think Token ring is. If you mean to say that since cat5 (containing copper wire) and Fiber all have above have protocols built atop them that easily use IP, and are already in place, we should use them. I agree with that.

But T-1 is , iirc, usually copper, intrinsically never needs IP to do communication by itself, and has been doing so for a while. (...or you can call it ds-1 and not tie it to being used with a particular medium.) Yes, you can abstract IP information into it, but you don't have to.
no flames intended on my part, and i'm probably more wrong than right. Just my thoughts on it though.

Re:Why IP?

[NitsujTPU]

All digital phones just become bits... but yes, I can see where standardization helps. I still don't understand why SOME networks have made the switch though. Some it's litterally like, IP/SOMETHING/IP/SOMETHING tunneling. Very LOW network utilization.

Re:Why IP?

[NitsujTPU]

Think about it though... Why? I mean, the reason that it's cheaper from me in my home, is because I'm already paying for the bandwidth with my cable company, who are paying comparable charges to the same that any phone carrier giving long distance would charge. At the level of phone carriers, the charges are still the same. VoIP is only cheaper for businesses and consumers who aren't already paying routing fees, but rather are paying the phone company's random long distance charges.

Re:Why IP?

[Bookwyrm]

Why do we do everything over IP? I mean, honestly, it's a good protocol and all, but it's not perfect for everything. There are already digital wireless phones, and not all of them use IP.

Why would one want to use an ATM/IP/IPX/IP network when they could just use whatever works best for that application?

You are confused because you are thinking like an engineer, rather than a philosopher or an idealist. Ideally, we could just have one protocol (to rule them all, in the darkness bind (v9.2) them...), but it is not a very practical solution.

I rather suspect there is this problem with people getting the network protocols confused with the applications that run over them. The "everything over IP" crowd seems to be mostly the same group that feels that NAT is a bad thing -- i.e. that everything should be one big network with the same addressed space (i.e. the Intranet, really, rather than the Internet, because the latter implies connections between different networks.) From this point of view, the "everything over IP" is the equivalent of saying, for example, "everything over copper wire, and only over copper wire -- it does not matter if fiber optic cable makes more sense for certain specific applications, you would need a converter to convert between copper and fiber, and that would break the end to end connection!"

If you can pry the application out of the network protocol (i.e. IPv4), such that the application is independent of the underlying protocol (as it ought to be), then you could more easily use the apropriate protocol for the apropriate application when necessary. However, as long as the masses believe there is some magic inherent in end-to-end un-NAT'ed networks, IPv4 will remain God, and IPv6, among other things, will never arrive. (It's not magic, it's bad design which requires end-to-end transport without allowing for the possibility of transport conversion.)

It is a bizarrely almost Luddite mindset. I mean, honestly, is it just me, or does anyone else feel that the "IP is your Lord god, and you shall have no protocol before IP" mindset is intellectually stifling?

And now the modding down may commence...

Re:Why IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why do we do everything over IP? I mean, honestly, it's a good protocol and all, but it's not perfect for everything. There are already digital wireless phones, and not all of them use IP. Why would one want to use an ATM/IP/IPX/IP network when they could just use whatever works best for that application?"

I am no Wireless Telephone Engineer, but I do believe that VoIP allows a greater number of simultaneous connections per dollar spent on hardware. This lowers operating costs and reduces dropped calls. Ultimately, it leads to better service for lower cost.

Re:Why IP?

[NitsujTPU]

Thank God someone agrees with me!

Re:Why IP?

[alienmole]

I sympathize with your perspective, but I don't think it's as simple as you suggest. There are a whole host of factors that converge to make IP attractive to a wide audience.

One important factor is that many people saying "use IP" are really saying "use a standard, packet-switched protocol". There are some good reasons for doing this, too. But it just so happens that in today's world, only one protocol fits that bill. To demonstrate the impact of this issue, from your comment, I can't tell whether you think packet-switching in general is being overused, or just IP. The two have become virtually synonymous.

Technically, it's not that difficult to support replaceable network and transport layer protocols. Novell did it, a long time ago. That would allow more diversity in the choice of protocol. But the problem is standardization - everyone would have to agree on the infrastructure to support that. To summarize wildly, it was easier just to agree on a single network and transport layer protocol suite, than on a standard for making those protocols pluggable.

Having agreed on the standard, we're now stuck with a situation in which it tends to make sense to do anything that needs packet-switching, using IP. Even if it doesn't seem to always make technical sense, it often makes economic sense, because you can reuse existing technology, expertise, and infrastructure. Networks effects can be wonderful, but they're also tyrannical.

Re:Why IP?

[RollingThunder]

Presumably, because then you only need to buy a set of really decent IP hardware - which is practically commodity these days compared to something for "insert new protocol here". Lowering the cost (ongoing and initial) makes it closer to achieving profit.

Re:Why IP?

[drinkypoo]

IPv6 is bloody fantastic. It's got little overhead, a rich feature set, lots of addresses (though I might have considered a standard with even more of them, personally) and there is no kind of device being made today which cannot reasonably speak IPv6.

Now just as people say you cannot prepare for peace while preparing for war (or whatever) you cannot advocate IPv4 without advocating NAT, because IPv4 addresses are too scarce now. However IPv6 doesn't necessarily have this problem. So IPv6 for everything! Why use anything else? Well, except for the fact that everything's IPv4 now. But when we get IPv6 support in everything important and ISPs start pushing out IPv6 I think the world can be a better place.

Also optimally everything would have a static IP address, whether it's up or not. Can't pull this off with IPv4, obviously. But anyway any device which wants to talk to the internet should have matching forward and reverse DNS and its very own non-shared IP.

Re:Why IP?

[silas_moeckel]

Because IP is working on being ubiquitious no it's not a perfect match for voice applications but everybody wants access to IP networks thats a given so why not run something that works reasonably well and avoid a legacy network. IPv6 is something the telcos are still trying to figure out a way to bill for so it's not happening in the commercial world more than the accountants can avoid. But just think VoIP could be the killer app that gets QOS features standard accross the board finaly. QOS might push us to IPv6 and thus to multicast and finaly getting rid of NAT (this is a good thing) but still dosent solve a better way of figuring out routing better than today. And who knows maybe with VoIP we can just pay for the data as in cell phone in range of home wifi gateway use that connections instead same for office etc.

Re:Why IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

The one place IPv6 truly dropped the ball was in not using geographical address assignment.

Re:Why IP?

[chill]

Indirectly. It allows for the company to use the same basic equipment for both data and voice traffic. Instead of buying Lucent for Cell/ATM/DSL, Alcatel for DSL, Cisco for enterprise data, they can then route much of it over the same equipment -- Lucent or Cisco. (Okay, maybe Nortel.)

It allows them to integrate equipment much better.

On the other hand, the data and voice people are two completely different breeds. Two different budgets, management software, thought patterns, etc. This is going to make life chaotic for quite some time.

Re:Why IP?

[mdechene]

Why IP? Because it's cheaper for the service provider, that's why. And it it's cheaper for the service provider, it's cheaper for the end user. VOIP means they don't have to give you a dedicated line for sending your call. Your call is already multiplexed over the air (What did you think the M in TDMA and CDMA stood for?). So why not multiplex it more over the wired portion of the call? Why do they push digital multiplexing algorithms so much? Because it's cheaper!

Re:Why IP?

[NitsujTPU]

I thought that the wired portion of the phone system was already soft routed and mulitplexed?

Re:Why IP?

[Cato]

This is a somewhat 1980s perspective - back when there were multiple layer 3 and 4 network technologies and IP was just one of them, it was common to invent transport-independent APIs. However, this still leaves the issue of transport level gateways to allow the end hosts to communicate. It's much easier to just use IP everywhere so that IF you want your mobile phone to talk to a Sun server there is no technical barrier to doing so.

The drive for end to end no-NAT networks is exactly why IPv6 should take off - unfortunately NAT is such a popular quick fix that this may take a long time. Ironically enough, transport-independent APIs will enjoy a resurgence as part of the conversion to IPv6.

Re:Why IP?

[Drownedrat]

Good business.

If you build your network to use IP it can carry anything not just voice, so you increase your market catch.

Mobile data is one of the few things selling at the moment.

D.

Re:Why IP?

[Bookwyrm]

After reading some of the comments around here, I think there needs to be a new moderation type of "Missed the point".

Re:Why IP?

[grumling]

If you can pry the application out of the network protocol (i.e. IPv4), such that the application is independent of the underlying protocol (as it ought to be), then you could more easily use the apropriate protocol for the apropriate application when necessary.

You can also simplify spinning out the aplication from the network. The trend in Telecom these days is to divorce yourself from the expensive parts of your network that will "never" make money, and focus on the higher margin parts.

For example, AT&T no longer owns their towers. They lease them from American Tower, because they don't want to be in the tower business. They run and manage their network. Another example is cable television. The money isn't in running the local office, it is in running the channels.

I think that cellular companies are in the process of doing the same thing. They see themselves as service providers, not infrastructure players. After all, the network is just a big drain on their bottom line, and it will be better to get rid of all that and lease the network you want from someone else.

Re:Why IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, we have invested in creating a huge international infrastructure of interconnected nodes.

It consists of hundreds of fibreoptic links spanning thousands of miles. The fact it is so widley used has helped drive down prices to access it, and it is now readilly available for most people.

Now, it seems logical that using internet infrastructure would be a lot more sensible than using your phone companies overcharged proprietry network, and having to pay huge rates to be able to make international calls which bridge accross many providers infrastructure.

Zone-MR

Re:Why IP?

[smallpaul]

he "everything over IP" crowd seems to be mostly the same group that feels that NAT is a bad thing -- i.e. that everything should be one big network with the same addressed space (i.e. the Intranet, really, rather than the Internet, because the latter implies connections between different networks.)

Nobody disputes the value of having different networks connected together. But what makes the Internet the dominant network on the planet is that it connected those networks into a single address space. The reason you want this can be summarized as Metcalfe's law. The benefits are eminently practical. For instance, if you have a machine in the Internet address space and you want to make files available to me, you just tell me the IP number of your machine and I can connect and use FTP or WebDAV to get the files. But if you give me an AppleTalk, SMB or Intranet address, I probably cannot connect to you. This isn't utopian idealism, it is pragmatic engineering.

Now the truth is that I really don't care much whether every two machines in the world choose to talk IP to each other. On a network of Macintoshes, use Appletalk. On a network of cell phones, use whatever protocol they use. But I do want every machine int he world to have a unique IP address so that it can participate directly in Internet protocols like HTTP, SMTP, Jabber and SIP. Supporting IP+X is even better than IP alone, if X adds value to IP.

Re:Why IP?

[nickjennings]

The "everything over IP" crowd seems to be mostly the same group that feels that NAT is a bad thing -- i.e. that everything should be one big network with the same addressed space (i.e. the Intranet, really, rather than the Internet, because the latter implies connections between different networks.)

I don't agree at all. I like the idea of everything using a standard protocol. I hate having to deal with bridging different *types* of networks together, and the incompatibility and limitations that creates. (Think Netware).

I also implement NAT'd networks quite a bit, and find it extremely usefull. The two prefferences have nothing to do with each other.

Re:Why IP?

[NitsujTPU]

You can carry digital data over EXISTING digital phone networks IE anything that you like. All that VOIP does is force all of the data into the IP tunnel. It's already digital since it's capable of carrying IP.

Re:Why IP?

[NitsujTPU]

You still have to carry the IP over that network. Either way you pay for it, but in one you have to pay for the bandwidth overhead of encapsulating the data that you're actually trying to get from point A to point B in IP.

Re:Why IP?

[tHiNk411]

Simple reason for voice over ip phones. Long Distance. And yea National is free, but have you seen the rates on international calls from VoIP? cheap!

Re:Why IP?

[NitsujTPU]

Right, but this is talking about carriers wanting to switch. VoIP is cheaper because the carriers give you better rates. These carriers are paying over land lines that carry the IP, so they are paying the same rate that they would to carry non-ip signals... actually, they are paying a bit more because they are paying for the extra bandwidth. The only way that they MIGHT get a better deal is to split a line in an existant IP network that gets better rates, but even then, the IP network is paying the long haul rates. Perhaps bandwidth sharing would save them some cash, but major carriers like AT&T and Sprint don't really have anything to gain.

repeat

[Anonymous Coward]

echo echo echo. How many times is this story going to be posted

Downloadable Voice Filters

[martyb]

...your "voice" (er .. audio) just becomes bits that your programs can manipulate before sending."

Great. Just Great. First it was downloadable ring tones. Now it'll be customized voice filters. I can just see the advertisement now:

For your next heavy-breathing prank call, get our Darth Vader filter NOW! ;^)

Re:Downloadable Voice Filters

[Anonymous Coward]

luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuke. i am your faatherrr.

Re:Downloadable Voice Filters

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your favorite scary movie?

Re:Downloadable Voice Filters

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you like scary movies?

why not improve current technology?

[Savatte]

The clarity is bad enough already. Why throw more noise in the way. Aren't cell phones already kinda internet-enabled? Aren't they just p2p voice-only clients?

Re:why not improve current technology?

[kaxman]

There won't be any noise, just packet loss. You'll miss a word here or there, but the ones that _do_ make it though will sound just right :D

Re:why not improve current technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know of one cell phone on the market right now that is p2p voice. Maybe in Japan, but in the US, no. It's a client/server relationship with the cell towers being the server and the cell phones being clients. P2P would be everyone has a node, and packets are routed through nodes.

Re:why not improve current technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

is that the idea behind mesh networks? this seems to be the way forward !

Crap

[kaxman]

This'll shove IPv6 right down our throats.

*sigh*

Looks like I'll have to learn how to subnet again...

Re:Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

::::f93ae:fd393:/(2^64), coming right up?

Re:Crap

[needamiracle]

LOL, I thought the same thing...

But....

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I don't LIKE the idea of my phone being able to manipulate my voice bits?

Telephony

[Anonymous Coward]

Is about reliable, guaranteed low-latency transfer of 300Hz-3400kHz audio signal. Connectionless, packet switched, best-effort protocols such as IP are just not suited for this purpose. It ain't gonna work. Behold!

Re:Telephony

[Anonymous Coward]

so you think you are smarter than the rocket scientists that are working on this? You really think they haven't thought of your puny retort?

Re:Telephony

[Anonymous Coward]

They are NOT rocket scientists, but telecommunications engineers, just as I am. And yes, I do think that I am just as smart as they are, my arguments have to be judged by their merit. The dot.com bust-up more than justifies my concerns about the everything-over-ip-saves-world type technical solutions. Knowing the history of our industry, I am almost sure that it's a dead end. Wanna bet?

Re:Telephony

[ignantjim]

Tell me how you think circuit switched networks with their heavy reliance on centralized services(and enormous overhead required to deliver what amounts to SS7 encoded data anyway) are doing currently. Think about it...how many folks out there have experienced less than satisfactory service while making a cell phone call? The point therefore is not that we try to emulate the quality standards of the past. Those days are gone. Perhaps we should be ashamed for allowing ourselves to become complacent and put up with dropped calls and echos, but I still choose a cell phone over a landline phone any day. The fact remains that customers will define for us as engineers the expected requirements. Sadly or not, those requirements and expectations are sliding. Will IP networks be prevalent enough for this? Of course. They already are. Will IP networks provide a way to secure the data? Its an open standard, get busy! Will people object to their phone calls buzzing through data networks as 1's and 0's? They don't care! They just want to be able to get service and make calls.

This could be great

[Daimaou]

"your "voice" (er .. audio) just becomes bits that your programs can manipulate before sending."

I can't wait until someone creates a cell-VoIP-phone virus that scrambles your sentences into vulgarities and profanities whenever you try to call your mom.

Re:This could be great

[Anonymous Coward]

It will called tourettes.vbs

Re:This could be great

[commodoresloat]

Hi, Mom! How are you?

I send you this stream of obscenities in order to have your advice.

See you later

Thanks

Re:This could be great

[Jucius Maximus]

"I can't wait until someone creates a cell-VoIP-phone virus that scrambles your sentences into vulgarities and profanities whenever you try to call your mom."

This reminds me of a dorm room joke. If you want to spook your dorm-roommate-buddy, then do the following:

Just before the person is about to enter the room, pick up the phone and pretend to be having a terrible argument. You scream obscenities into the phone and slam the receiver down. Then, you look at your astonished room mate and say, "That was your mom, she said she'd call back."

Re:This could be great

[Anonymous Coward]

If I could travel back in time, the first thing I would do is murder the guy who butchered the ZeroWing translation. Next, I would kill the Goatse.cx while he was still a baby. After that, I'd pour steaming hot grits on Natelie Portman so she was disfigured for life.

That is all.

Concerns

[cadillactux]

Maybe it's just me, but I am forsee so many problems with this. With VoIP cell phones, your phone would bascially become another 'computer'-like node on a network. Look at the problems facing computers today.

First, as mentioned a few posts above, it would be simple to add a voice filter to any phone. Download a program into it, and it will manipulate the bits making your voice unrecognizable. While in some cases, this is a plus, with the annonimity of cell phones now, this could be used for all sorts of prank, and malicious phone calls.

Viruses will run rampent(sp)! A simple cell call from one VoIP phone to another could potentially carry a virus embeded into the bits. Answer a phone call, and your phone's screen starts flashing with Devil horns... or an IE logo... Your phone is now dead.

In addition to viruses, 'dialer' type programs could potentially be downloaded to your phone, and used to call other phones to spread. Your think pr0n dialers now are bad, imagine your phone bill coming in only to notice that your have 100 out-of-country calls on it.

These are only a sampling of the problems we could face. DoS phone attacks, worms, everything that attacks a standard computer now could be used against your cell phone, after all, they are all built about bits sent back and forth...

Re:Concerns

[Anonymous Coward]

So are you saying that the bad of IP outweighs the good? Somebody could of made the same arguments against IP as a protocol, and there would be no Internet today. I have trust that the scientists who are working on it will think about these issues. They are rather obvious, after all.

Re:Concerns

[G-funk]

How did this ever get modded up? A VoIP virus?

Yeah.... just like all those viruses my computer got from MP3 files.... I mean, look at them... they've destroyed so many computers. Because I know every phone will try to execute the audio data... Because that's what you do isn't it? You execute audo data as instructions???

Re:Concerns

[Dokta_C]

If you ever owned a Sinclair Spectrum, then, yes, you did.

Z80 processor, 24k ram, audio tapes for storage.

Re:Concerns

[MarkKnopfler]

Your supposition has a fundamental flaw. You are confusing an operating system and an IP stack. Just because has a device has an IP stack does not mean it will start behaving like windows. By that logic, every router, switch, or linux box should do everything a windows box does because of the evil IP stack.

Re:Concerns

[almaw]

You *won't* be able to "simply add a voice filter", any more than you can at the moment. Changing the transport protocol doesn't affect the difficulty in programming the embedded hardware.

Viruses won't run rampant. Why should they? Just because something talks IP doesn't mean you can make it execute arbitrary code. Viruses don't run rampant on managed switches, and they talk IP...

I don't understand where you're getting all this rubbish from. If it's so easy to do, why haven't people been doing it with standard GPRS links? What difference does putting IP in make? AFAIK, none at all.

Now, DoS attacks are a different thing entirely. About your only valid point.

Please understand what you're talking about before posting sensationalist drivel like this.

Perhaps you should get a job as a journalist? :)

Kelly Cornia reading slashdot again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is it doug jacobs tonight? (oh wait, I forgot, he joined the cult, he has no time for slashdot anymore)

More DRM implimentations...

[Cyno01]

so now w/ VoIP they **AA can put DRM in our cell fones and put on content filters to keep us from speaking copyrighted phrases etc, although this could put an end to people calling me and asking me if i can hear them now...

Re:More DRM implimentations...

[intermodal]

the *AA's won't stop you from using it...they'll make you pay per use of each catch phrase...

Sample phone bill

"can you hear me now" $1
"What'chou talkin' bout, willis?" (from a phone call with your friend willis) $1
"Use the Force" $20 x 456 uses $456 ...and down on the line...

Re:More DRM implimentations...

[blochsound]

Another application could be pgp encryption on phone systems. i don't know if that has anything to do with the network layer......but I think this would be a great deal.

Re:More DRM implimentations...

[Anonymous Coward]

$20 times 456 is $9,120 not $456.

and...?

[Scaebor]

You might ask "why bother? We already have wireless voice now." But with an open platform for wireless (Symbian, JavaPhone etc), your "voice" (er .. audio) just becomes bits that your programs can manipulate before sending."

and... this is the explanation? What am i missing here? This is a serious question. With all the ideas that you people come up with there must surely be some good reason for having a phone that has ip integrated into it.

Re:and...?

[SandSpider]

One example would be encryption - you could, for example, use gpg to encrypt the packets, or whatever the latest hot encryption scheme is. If you want to change it, that's a simple task, since it's just software. You don't have to buy and install new hardware just to change the way the phone works.

And, of course I know that it would be impractical to do with the current VoIP systems, since a lost packet would cause no end of difficulty. I'm talking in an ideal world.

It wouldn't be necessary to do VoIP to do this, though. Special 'data-phones' could be made that start a call, check to see if there's a compatible phone on the other end, and start a data connection if so. Though that wouldn't be very high quality over a 56k modem, chances are, though you could get by a lot better with a specialized protocol that doesn't have the overhead of TCP/IP, I suspect. But really, I'm just making all this up, now.

=Brian

I'd rather

[URoRRuRRR]

I'd rather have phones that worked really well first. I'm tried of having half of my calls dropped.

Re:redundant

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging from the archives it appears they can stretch this technology very far.

Latency & Jitter

[chill]

Voice uses circuits for a reason -- latency and jitter *must* be controlled or the conversation goes to hell.

There has to be more to wireless VoIP than simply 3G+ data -- it must be able to control the timing of the arrival of packets.

No, you can't buffer it. Voice conversations are realtime interactive. Fat packet sizes don't help, either. There is a limit to how long you can spend processing the data into and out of a packet before you screw up the timing.

They have a LONG way to go before this will be realistic.

Re:Latency & Jitter

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello?

(wait one and a half seconds)

(click)

How weird that a telemarketer shows up on call display as my mother...

Re:Latency & Jitter

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Voice uses circuits for a reason -- latency and jitter *must* be controlled or the conversation goes to hell.

True, however if the network is lightly loaded, IP introduces negligable latency and jitter. VOIP is already being used for long-distance telephone calls.

There is a limit to how long you can spend processing the data into and out of a packet before you screw up the timing.

True. However we are not talking about big packets. Normal telephone quality is only 64kb/s (56kb/s in the US). The reason they are going with VOIP is compression- you can compress the date down by a factor of perhaps 4 fairly easily; partly because you can compress the sound by that much quite quickly, but also because on most telephone conversations only one person talks at once. That's important in a wireless phone network.

Re:Latency & Jitter

[Arandir]

You don't understand. VoIP is a buzzword. That means all the cool companies must have it in order to stay cool. It doesn't matter if it works or not. It doesn't matter if you can't understand the guy on the other end of the line. It doesn't matter if it overloads your network to the point of unusability. It's cool so cool companies must have it.

Re:Latency & Jitter

[chill]

True, however if the network is lightly loaded, IP introduces negligable latency and jitter. VOIP is already being used for long-distance telephone calls.

True, but no phone network is lightly loaded, except at 2:00 a.m. or so. The phone companies have oversubscription down to a fine art.

The VoIP compression kicks in on the backbone transit, as opposed to the actual endpoint allowing more data to be multiplexed in. Yes, silence supression, comfort noise and single/full-duplex play a big part.

Actually, many of the phone networks are doing the VoIP modulation at either end, then using ATM switches in between. So, in essence, there is still a circuit. However, MPLS is starting to be a big buzzword and companies are starting to deploy it as opposed to Frame Relay and ATM. Still, ATM is king when it comes to these types of applications. Real QoS, real ToS, can't be beat.

Re:Latency & Jitter

[Lars Arvestad]

The reason they are going with VOIP is compression- you can compress the date down by a factor of perhaps 4 fairly easily;

I'm not sure what your point is: Modern mobile phone systems are also digital and doing compression. It actually to find code for GSM compression on the net! Anyway, compression and digital transport is not a reason for VoIP.

Lars

Re:Latency & Jitter

[CiaranMc]

No, you can't buffer it

Why not?

Existing digital cell systems already have a significant delay and you just don't notice it. Next time you're in a cell->cell call try singing along to music that's playing at the other end. To the other person you'll sound hopelessly out of time.

-Ciaran

Re:Latency & Jitter

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.sipcenter.com/

SIP solves all of the above.....adopted by all 3G companies.

NEXT!

Re:Latency & Jitter

[WolfWithoutAClause]

True, but no phone network is lightly loaded, except at 2:00 a.m. or so.

VOIP gives you a 4:1 compression or more anyway, so for any bandwidth you already have, you're better off converting it to VOIP, and bingo- no significant congestion! If you have no congestion on your data network, you have no significant latency. You don't always need fancy protocols. You then have spare bandwidth as well.

Re:Latency & Jitter

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Ok, I've got this voice network set up, and I can handle 100,000 calls per hour. If I go to VOIP I can handle 300,000 calls per hour. You're arguing that that is not worth doing?

It's the statistical multiplexing that IP and VOIP provides for that allows the compression to work...

Re:Latency & Jitter

[chill]

Traditional voice is compressed as well -- VoIP doesn't add signigicantly to this. There is no real compression benefit here.

Latency is more than just congestion. It is also affected by the number of 'hops' to go thru, the size of the routing table, any necessary reroutes, etc.

VoIP is not a magic bullet for networks, it is a buzzword. It also DOES help them consolidate equipment.

Much of the traditional digital cellular traffic is switched thru an ATM fabric. The ATM units are drastically underutilized by this and adding an OC-12 card and separating out the data would be trivial.

Re:Latency & Jitter

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Traditional voice is compressed as well

It can be, but it isn't usually, ISDN voice calls aren't for example, most but not all landlines aren't (except if you are a long way from the office). Even when it is, you still have to leave both directions open I believe.

VOIP doubles capacity again, because they can usually run it half duplex and rely on statistical multiplexing. That's more difficult with traditional compression techniques.

Re:Latency & Jitter

[Lars Arvestad]

And where are you getting these numbers from? I just reread the article and I don't see a claim that VoIP will do better than other digital wireless phone technologies.

The discussion is about wireless VoIP, and even todays mobile phone systems such as GSM are already doing AD conversion and putting the bits in packets. With compression.

Lars

Re:Latency & Jitter

[WolfWithoutAClause]

GSM does use compression, but does not put the voice traffic into packets, they use fixed timeslots, of a fixed size.

GSM voice traffic doesn't use IP!

GSM phones use nailed up connections for their voice traffic whilst the call is up. They also have data channels which are used for control information, but the voice goes over the nailed up connections. They therefore can't use the statistical multiplexing that VOIP uses, and they can't run single duplex, because their voice bandwidth is connected at the beginning of the call and disconnected at the end.

so i can finally 'mutate' my voice when i wake up

[Skal Tura]

So i can finally use some software to mutate my voice when i wake up my friend saying 'Hi, this is Detective X from LAPD' or something similar, and as he/she is so sleepy he/she won't check caller information but tries to recognize by voice... so that kind of phone would make it way more easier ;) i wonder how many mornings i have been waken up somebody saying something very odd on the phone and i cannot recognize the voice and just think, wtf, am i suspected about something? being so sleepy that i don't check the phone's screen for who it is... sometimes call was pretty shortly over and at somewhere middle of day i remember and check that caller information... Lol, best one to date have been someone calling me middle of night saying 'is your pillow allright?' and then giving me a long silence before i knew who it was =) Yeah, i know this is way offtopic... and yeah it's middle of night here, 5AM to be exact... perhaps time for a good 'night' sleep... Btw, to be in topic that kind of phone would give probably a lot of some nice features with it...

Cybernetic Zombie's Network

phreaking

[intermodal]

now all we need is a hack for these to use open wireless networks to make calls to japan for free...without some poor sap to foot the bill for the phone charge, just the bandwith. Does anyone else foresee a new phreaking frontier?

Re:phreaking

[postgresqlstart]

Somebody better call ol' capt. crunch up.

The Revolution Continues etc.

[Stoptional]

Nick Negroponte had it right. (You still reading this?) What we are seeing here is nothing less than the continuation of the "digital revolution". Essentially, information is just bits. Why should we pay more for bits that encode audio (er . . speech) than we do for bits that encode other types of data - video, text etc.

In case you don't know or have forgotten - we *are* in the middle of a revolution as culture changing as the Industrial Revolution or the Agricultural Revolution.

Re:The Revolution Continues etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, you are so mid '90s. What the hell has 'Nick' done recently, anyway?

Re:redundant

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I never cease to be amazed at the novel uses that people find for old technologies. But hey, that's human ingenuity for you.

Bandwidth issues....

[JumboMessiah]

It seems today that everyone is trying to take something designed to operate over a private/proprietary network and push it out over the internet. In the article, Waryas says, "there is a potential return for carriers using the IP backbone to transfer calls versus digital signals". If this were to materialize over the next three years, what can we expect of the internet backbone as a whole? Phones already have an addressing system (aka a "phone number"), is it a good idea to provide an IP address to _every_ cell phone? Perhaps IPv6 could help here, but it also begs the question of who will absorb the added bandwith utilization/costs? A call from east coast to west coast could traverse two or three backbone providers. I can just imagine the congestion at the peer points.

Don't get me wrong, it would be really nice to have a handheld device or laptop + handheld/cell phone to be able to natively handle IP traffic, but I also wonder what the long term affects would be on the traditional internet...

Re:Bandwidth issues....

[WolfWithoutAClause]

If this were to materialize over the next three years,

The statistic I heard is that already 20% of all long distance calls are on VOIP. (They usually use private networks right now though.)

what can we expect of the internet backbone as a whole?

Not a lot actually. We passed the point where most traffic was data traffic a couple of years ago. The data traffic is doubling about every year. The voice traffic is going up by some single digit percentage every year. Therefore very soon, voice traffic will be completely inconsiderable part of the internet.

Re:Bandwidth issues....

[JumboMessiah]

The statistic I heard is that already 20% of all long distance calls are on VOIP.

I suppose there would be incredible incentive for a company to setup a VoIP infrastructure using standard leased links carrying IP traffic. I'm sure the cost savings would be very substantial. I know of some call centers that trunk calls using VoIP to their satelite centers over leased private networks.

I also don't doubt that VoIP traffice over the internet is rising in the single digits per year. Fairly insignificant if the true non VoIP traffic is doubling every year. But, would the sheer number of cell phones in use cause this statistic to explode beyond belief? Perhaps to the point where VoIP traffic is on par with the data traffic.

If the above theory would become a reality, I can imagine wars breaking out amongst the backbone providers over who's going to absorb the costs. Say backbone provider B is a transient between providers A and C. Furthermore, say a healthy percentage of B's traffic is VoIP traffic originating from A to C or C to A. Provider B may get a little discouraged over the idea that the amount of transient traffic (peer traffic) vs. the amount of originated traffic (you know, the bandwitdh they actually charge for) is climbing steadily.

It would be interesting to see some numbers regarding the number of cell phones in use vs. the number of allocated IP addresses within the U.S. Almost everyone I know of has a cell phone.

Of course, I also agree that this is futher off than three years. As a previous poster already stated, the latencies your see over the net, most of the time, aren't ideal for voice.

Re:Bandwidth issues....

[WolfWithoutAClause]

I also don't doubt that VoIP traffice over the internet is rising in the single digits per year.

VOIP as a whole is growing far faster than that. VOIP on the internet- I'm sorry I don't know.

Perhaps to the point where VoIP traffic is on par with the data traffic.

The whole point of VOIP is that you send voice as data, so... no. ;-) Besides there's already more data than voice, so it's looking unlikely those two lines are ever going to cross again right now.

Cell phone heat

[stefanlasiewski]

"Sorry, I got to keep this phone call short! If I talk too long, the VOIP processing chip heats up and burns my cheek!"

Re:Cell phone heat

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, anything to shut cell phone users up...

Re:redundant

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is full of shit. The guy obviously doesn't know his head from his ass, and he certainly is not the computer scientist he claims to be: anybody who knows the first thing about IP would see through his 'perpetual motion machine' approach to getting around the jitter problem.

Now I remember why I stopped reading /.

What's wrong with this picture?

[Animats]

From the article: "A completely new infrastructure is needed with fatter pipes." Huh? We need a new infrastructure for voice so it will work worse and cost more?

This looks like yet another dumb justification for 3G cell phone technology. If you just want to ship the voice over long distances as IP, there's no reason to do it in the handset. Do it someplace where you have the connection to a fat pipe in place, like the cellular CO.

Voice over IP is an artifact of telecom pricing and history, not a technical advance. Circuit switching and packet switching now cost about the same (and they're likely to both be over ATM at the bottom.) But voice is billed by the minute, while the Internet is typically a low flat rate, and many countries use landline voice to subsidize other stuff.

But cellular has less of that heavily-regulated history. Where's the justification for this?

My Programs?

[evilhayama]

Just consider the possibilites of what I could do to enhance my telephone calls now... Get some mp3s in the background putting my phone call to a soundtrack, maybe adding sound effects here and there to spice up the conversation? ^_^ (not to mention the aforementioned voice morphing)

More seriously, does this mean i could encrypt my phone conversations with fellow terr... associates?

Re:My Programs?

[blochsound]

don't let that get out, with the patriot act, you don't want the big guys to even think about the applications we might have until its ubiquitous.

I love my government, but I fear them more.

What about viri?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great this is just what I need. Now someone can write a virus that runs on my cell phone and changes the words I speak.

"I'd like a large pizza" will become "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?"

The obvious answer: convergence

[tlambert]

The obvious answer: convergence.

If everything is over IP, then you can guarantee at least transport level interoperability with everything. That lets you do things like access mapping services or locale aware restraunt guides, etc., without having to gateway the content.

It also gets around the price differential for long distance service, and further commoditizes the pipe providers as just that: pipe provider, rather than toll-booths that bill based on destination.

Back in the DNSEXT (the IETF working group on DNS), there were a lot of cell phone providers who wanted to assign an IP address to every telephone, making it directly addressable from an outside server.

Among other things, this would let them push content to your phone, based on having a phone/IP identity, so that the phone could be contacted directly.

The downside of this is that they are not really planning on forcing the use of IPv6, and the IPv4 address space actually has too little remaining space for there to be the possibility of assigning an IPv4 address to every cellular telephone in existance.

So while convergence is attractive for the cell phone vendors, and the local carriers (neither of which who could care less if the long distance providers continued to make money, other than as flat rate pipe providers), it's unlikely to avoid the issues of having to have a gateway (NAT) device, unless they go IPv6. The current 3G phones in Europe (and the "2.5G" pgones in the U.S. require gateway devices).

FWIW, both Nokia and Ericson engineers were interested in the IP-per-phone idea when the issue came up on the mailing list, so it's likely they will be the first to be pushing the idea in the future.

-- Terry

Re:The obvious answer: convergence

[Cato]

All GPRS rollouts today use NAT, because the predicted number of active always-on users was so high - at one point the GSM Association asked for something like 2% of the IPv4 address space and was told to go away...

UMTS requires that IPv6 is enabled in some areas, and use of IPv6 is mandated by the UMTS Release 5 IP Multimedia System. This is a big driver for IPv6 and is one reason why Cisco, Juniper, Sun and co are shipping production IPv6 code.

Re:The obvious answer: convergence

[mesocyclone]

If convergence is the only reason, why not just do it all over TCP/IP or even HTML? (Answer: engineering reasons - same argument one might make against IP itself!).

Furthermore, IP is a low level protocol. It doesn't guarantee interopterability! To have interoperability, one needs all levels of the protocol stack to be compatable, and the hardest one there is the applications level, not the various transport levels. This means, for example, that if your phone does messaging, that it interoperate with other phones and/or hosts that provide messaging service. IP is the least of your problems in that regard!

I could see having, IPv6 addressability for all phones, but that is not the same thing as actually using *IP* as the transport mechanism.

Re:The obvious answer: convergence

[omibus]

Most dont use TCP/IP, it is to bulky. UDP/IP is far more common. Nice an light with none of the packet checking that you don't need anyway. After all, if a packet gets corrupted (on TCP/IP you have to resend a bad packet) you dont care, you get half a moment of static and you move on.

Re:turd post

[Anonymous Coward]

winner!!!

Will this finaly make for higher fidelity?

[autopr0n]

I mean really, we've been suffering with this lo-fi telephone stuff for a long time. Obviously the technology exists to have higher sample rate/depth audio even on simple computers. I remember recording "CD quality" sound with my 75mhz Pentium and a cheap $5 mic from radio shack. Yet telephones still use incredibly low sample rates.

We could even use some kind of audio compression on the data to achieve and end up using about the same amount of bandwidth. That normal telephones use now. I mean, a two channel mp3 sounds OK at 112kbps, so a one channel one should sound near CD quality at 56kbps.

If a cell phone came with VoIP on a G3/G2.5/whatever cell net, I would imagine it would be pretty easy to get it to run with high quality audio. Assuming that anyone would care.

(It would also probably require modifying the earpieces in cell phones, as they are obviously not designed for high quality audio)

Re:Will this finaly make for higher fidelity?

[Anonymous Coward]

NOOOOOOOO! Telephony is NOT about audio quality. It's about RE-LI-A-BI-LI-TY.

Audio quality has never been and will never be a goal. We will rather squeeze more poor-quality conversations into that high-quality channel ('cause that's what you subscribers PAY FOR -- we're in the business of making MONEY, baby!)

Re:Will this finaly make for higher fidelity?

[atrus]

I remember recording "CD quality" sound with my 75mhz Pentium and a cheap $5 mic from radio shack

"CD quality" does not been just having something recorded at 44.1KHz at 16 bits. A $5 rat shack microphone and a sound blaster is not going to get you anywhere near the capabilities of that low (vs. 24/96 or even 24/196) sample rate. Good audio equipment costs some real money. Take a look at this for a good quality entry level audio card. With good audio equipment (pre/pro, speakers), your $5 rat shack microphone recording will sound like utter crap compared to something recorded with this card (and a sennheiser or comparable microphone). Simple playback of normal CDs through this setup will also be an eye opening expierience.

Hello, anyone home?

[Arandir]

your "voice" (er .. audio) just becomes bits that your programs can manipulate before sending.

And just why does this require IP? Did you ever stop to realize that circuits can be digital? Why go to all this trouble to grind the internet to a halt just so you can get packet switching instead of circuitry?

Re:Hello, anyone home?

[cyberbob2010]

OSI layer 1 vs 2
Now, don't get me wrong - this is more of a question than anything else. I'm VERY new at this so please tell me the error of my ways but wouldn't that require a HELL of a lot of hubs for the data and some REALLY fat pipes to?. The whole point of having software is to direct the packets to where they are supposed to go. That's why routers work better than hubs right? Because hubs just act like repeaters while routers send things by MAC address? The same I think would be true with the phones. If you have all of these phones sending data out that is just being resent to everyone else anyway then I would think that to be EXTREMELY impractical. You cant do this kinda thing with just hardware can you? I don't know. Just my understanding of it all. Please clarify as like I said I'm a noob to this all.

and if microsoft had it their way ..

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be ... "yeah man, I leaned over to open my *BLEEP*, but as I staired out of the *BLEEP* this gorgeous chick came running over.

(Replace *BLEEP* with "Window").

wow

[Eat Cunt]

Can you imagine the money you could save? I will have to get that. Oh no! Now I bet I have to buy a microphone! D'oh! -Eat Cunt

This is exactly what I've been looking for

[machine of god]

Now I won't have to use a clumsy voice changer when I call in my ransom demands, because it will be built into my phone. Boy!

getting closer ...

[j1mmy]

what we need is ubiquotous, wireless internet access. forget all these cell standards. just give me airtime, i'll bring the device, what i do with it is my own business. if there were a better mechanism in place for net-to-net phone calls, we could do away with the legacy telephony infrastructure entirely. HOORJ!

A.D. 2002: Anonymous Pancake r teh WROGN!

[Anonymous Coward]

What you say ??

ATTENTION machine of god:

[Anonymous Coward]

This notice is to notify you that your post on slashdot.org has been submitted to the TIPS archive. Please report immediately to the nearest police station to expedite your punishment.

Love,
John Asscroft

But if they did that...

[hackwrench]

there goes my trip around the world with all my IPv6 devices...

Re:Curry House? Why Not?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll buy that for a dollar. The next /. meeting should serve Recipe Troll food at the meeting place! It would rule.

Re:But.... (secure)

[affegott]

Think about... this could pave the way for secure cell phones. If you have access to the bits, you can encrypt them...

Ryan

Well then there's a hermit shack with your name on

[hackwrench]

it... on the other hand
Come the revolution you'll eat strawberries and cream...er, have a phone able to manipulate your voice bits.

voip rocks :)

[grahamsz]

I've been using http://www.vonage.com for a couple of months now, and despite a few billing issues which have now been resolved, the service is great.

I can now make thousands of minutes of calls to the USA for $40/mo. I'm in the UK and so effectively get free international instead of free long distance.

If any of my friends here want to save $40 with a referral then let me know :) graha dot ms at graha dot ms

Re:voip rocks :)

[rixster]

Holy Potato !

I've spent weeks looking for a US (pref NYC) based VOIP provider and finally on slashdot I find a recommendation. Two questions : How did they respond when you said you were UK based and how did you get the voip router over here ?

Consider the $40 on the way !! I'll email later.

Re:voip rocks :)

[grahamsz]

well my domain provider just vanished.... :/

Contact me on graham at peppert dot demon dot co dot uk :)

Re:voip rocks :)

[birdguy]

I went to their site and checked them out. However, I had trouble understanding:

* 500 FREE Local and Long Distance Minutes

If I pay $19.95 for this plan, how can they possibly call it 'free'? For it to be free, I shouldn't have to pay anything until the 500 minutes are used.

Thanks for the link and the heads-up, but I think I'll pass. I have so little faith in companies that try to enhance one's perceived value with double-speak (cliche-ish buzzword alert!)

Re:voip rocks :)

[grahamsz]

Well in some senses you dont. Most of that $20 will go on bandwidth and ammortizing the cisco router they provide to you.

But yeah, it stinks of over the top advertising :(

Once again this lot provide a superb technical service let down by crappy marketing and a fairly inept billing department.

Aren't we GEEKS?

[LucidityZero]

I'm not specifically picking on the post I replied to, but to all of the posts of this train of thought.

You guys, I thought we were GEEKS here. I would love a VoIP cell phone, purely because it would be a VoIP cell phone. I am logged into AOL Instant Messenger 24 hours a day on my desktop, my laptop (when not in transit) my work machine AND my cellphone under 4 different names. Why? Just cause it's cool. I spend ridiculous amounts of money to constantly keep my computer hardware top-notch, cause I enjoy it. I run 4 different operating systems (Sun, RedHat, Windows and an AMIGA) on my machines, because I think it's neat. I mess around with proto-type and beta operating systems and software cause it's fun. I built a switch for my gaming consoles so I wouldn't have to unplug and replug their RCA cables, cause it was an enjoyable project. I own a 8-line modem switch so I can dial into my house and tape drives from the 1970's cause they're awesome things to have.

News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.

We're geeks, come on. Talk about how cool this is. Don't go attacking everything that comes by that is impracticle! Geeks are all ABOUT impracticle items/obsessions.

Send me one. I'll start using it now.

You're confusing routers with switches.

[hackwrench]

Switches work with data link layer 2 MAC addresses, while routers work with network layer 3 IP addresses, or other network layer addressing protocols.

I want Vader Voice module

[Ratso Baggins]

To replace the "whiny little dweeb" module it has now...

VOIP?? Do it yourself and do it for free!

[Travoltus]

I am wondering, don't they have PDAs now that have sound capability? If so, why not get a PDA running Linux and Gnomemeeting, get wireless 802.11b access, and chat with someone else with the same setup, for free?

Assuming of course that your PDA has sound capability, and you can hook it up to an available wireless high speed net, and the OTHER person has all of this, too. (Or at least, they are sitting by a computer running Gnomemeeting or Netmeeting.)

The PDA can also do a lot more at the same time, besides acting as an internet "cell phone", so really, it potentially gives more bang for the buck, than a cell phone doing VOIP. (Of course, cell phones are also becoming multifunctional.)

I have already talked to friends using a laptop on a hardline (ethernet) connection. Setting it up for wireless voice chat - or even wireless VIDEO chat - is now a cinch. The drawback is a laptop, even a "notebook", is unwieldy due to its size, as a makeshift cell phone. But it has vastly higher capacities for running software concurrently, and storing data, than a PDA, much less a cell phone.

The point is, we 'hackers' should be working to create an infrastructure where we can easily communicate via voice and perhaps even video, over the internet, WITHOUT extra charges (which VOIP inflicts upon you). We can do it - so why don't we?

Oh the latency! Oh the latency!

[io333]

My SprintPCS phone already has about a quarter second lag time between transmission at my end and reception at the other end, which, for a fast talker like me, is incredibly annoying. I always end up talking over the person at the other end. If that person doesn't realize what is actually happening, they often think I'm being extremely rude.

The delay is caused by the lag for A-D conversion in my handset, added to the D-A conversion and then possibly A-D again and then D-A again if I'm talking to a different digital cell phone user on another network.

Now if something like that were going to be combined with the added, and sometimes horrible latency of VoIP. Oh forget it. Just give me a land line. I'll pay whatever I have to for the luxury of 1880's technology.

VOIP rules

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently started using a VOIP Blaster between Seattle and Virgina with the open source Fobbit drivers. It works *great*. I love sticking it to the RBOCs.

With cable modem, the quality and latency are very good with UDP. TCP experiences some jitter, and the quality is only fair.

Bandwidth is only 1.5 KB/sec. There's no reason it wouldn't work from a wifi laptop.

News flash: VoIP actually works.

[XNormal]

You must be confusing "voice over IP" with "crappy free telephone calls over the public internet". Voice over IP in a controlled private network can have strict QoS guarantees on latency, jitter and packet loss. VoIP is actually used by many millions of people, most of them don't even know it.

Cellular networks use voice compression codecs that must accumulate a complete block of samples before compressing and transmitting it. They also use heavy error correction. Both of these factors introduces a very significant latency. If the voice compression blocks, error correction blocks and VoIP packets are all in sync some of these latencies overlap instead of adding up and it may not add any significant additional latency.

QoS for wireless

[Cato]

So VoIP needs QoS - this is a well established technology in IP. There are wireline VoIP providers today who use private IP networks (some using QoS based on queuing) and some who actually use the Internet and get good QoS - the latter have to closely monitor achieved QoS and be ready to switch their traffic to another provider, but they claim good QoS and their costs are very low.

For dependable service, network switching is not enough and QoS is probably essential. This is particularly true with 3G where you might be able to choose from the following VoIP-related services, all with different bandwidth/latency requirements:

- simple voice call

- stereo call (listen in to a live concert perhaps?)

- conference call (high QoS)

- multimedia conference (voice, data sharing)

- videoconference

These more flexible IP services are where circuit switching falls down.

IP QoS will have to develop hugely to work for wireless, though. In wireline environments, you can set up a QoS session using RSVP and have it stay up for minutes or hours, so setup latency is not a big issue. In wireless, the caller could be moving between cells in a car or train, and might spend only a matter of seconds in each cell - every time they move to a new cell, their QoS session must be partially recreated (from the core network to the new cell), in a matter of tens of milliseconds.

For quite some time, it may be more cost-effective to overbuild networks and introduce simplifying constraints, but eventually wireless IP QoS should take off as an invisible support for wireless VoIP and multimedia over IP.

UMTS, a key 3G standard mostly used outside North America, will be All-IP in Release 5, which is nearing completion and should be rolled out in a few years. This mandates the use of VoIP for all use of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (which enables the advanced services listed above). Current UMTS rollouts are using Release 99 or Release 4 (formerly Release 2000), which are much less IP-based.

Where NAT = masquerading...

[slittle]

that everything should be one big network with the same addressed space (i.e. the Intranet, really, rather than the Internet, because the latter implies connections between different networks

The Internet is a public network of networks, not a maze of private IP network gateways. Ever heard of a "Class C Network" or similar? They ARE separate networks, they just use a common protocol and address space to enable communication with each other. NAT is a proxy, not a network.

At first I misread the title...

[elixx]

to say VoIP Cell Phones cloning.
I wonder how long...

article has a bug

[cascadingstylesheet]

You might ask "why bother? We already have wireless voice now." But with an open platform for wireless (Symbian, JavaPhone etc), your "voice" (er .. audio) just becomes bits that your programs can manipulate before sending."

Hey, we've discovered a slash bug.

See how the article cuts off right there? Where's the rest of the explanation? He must have actually answered the question in the complete article! ;)

Intended use

[MattBurke]

What everyone seems to be missing is the real usefulness of this, which is indoors.

Would you as a company rather have your employees wandering around your site running up silly bills on their company mobile phones, or have all calls from within the site routed through your nice cheap switchboard?

Also I work in a datacentre which seems to have just as much metal as brick in the walls. Wireless VoIP phones are excellent in that you can walk over to a server room and work on a server whilst talking to someone due to the provision of WAPs within the building. With GSM and 'landlines', this would be impossible.

It's only taken them 3 years to catch up

[linuxtelephony]

I've been saying this was the direction wireless carriers were going to go for several years. Even wrote an article on LinuxTelephony about it September, 1999.

Once the carriers are able to deliver real data bandwidth, then using data-centric technologies to transfer voice will make more sense and will ultimately prevail.

They already use a similar technology!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out www.i-link.com

it's VOIP + Cellular network... Very nice technology, this company is one of the better VOIP companies in the world right now. A sleeper, when the technology becomes a standard over PBX systems, this company is going to be a big hit! Current stock price is around $.20 - Invest away!

-Mirrorkat

Mod parent moron down

[malakai]

Viruses will run rampent(sp)! A simple cell call from one VoIP phone to another could potentially carry a virus embeded into the bits. Answer a phone call, and your phone's screen starts flashing with Devil horns... or an IE logo... Your phone is now dead

A phone called placed between two VOIP enabled devices using SIP has about as much chance of executing arbitrary code as a browser does displaying a jpg image. Yes, a chance exists (poorly written code with buffer overflows at precisely the wrong time) but on a scale of 1 to 10 it's a -7.

Everything else you listed can be done using current technology without VOIP cell phones. You can buy a voice muffler device from RadioShack, not to mention a bag with marbles worked well for Charlie Browns teacher (waaah waah wahhh wahh?).

Put down the joint, lose the paranoia, and see the brigther side of life (tunneling your cell phone calls over WIFI points bypassing Ma'Bell and possibly for free or pennies on the minute).

-malakai

Re:Mod parent moron down

[Bookwyrm]

A phone called placed between two VOIP enabled devices using SIP has about as much chance of executing arbitrary code as a browser does displaying a jpg image. Yes, a chance exists (poorly written code with buffer overflows at precisely the wrong time) but on a scale of 1 to 10 it's a -7.

Have you studied SIP? It's just begging for security problems between the nightmare of parsing and the arbitrary URLs being allowed in various fields. If a SIP message has "Alert-Info: <http://cracked.site.com/booby_trap.wav>", in it, do you think the SIP stack is going to fetch and play the ringtone, or will it hand it off to, say, a browser, or perhaps a media player?

One still has to wonder about diddling with the Via: headers in a message to redirect the response path to target systems within a network, but, well, that is another topic.

It's going to take years for SIP to get secured -- it's too new to have had a thorough shake out.

Using IP addresses as resource specifiers

[Bookwyrm]

You've confused a single network transport address space with a single application address space.

The value is in a single *directory* address space. Unfortunately, people use IP addresses to refer to resources, rather than, say, hostnames or something that is not bound directly to the network technology. This is precisely the sort of thing which hinders a transition to IPv6.

This is a far more practical and pragmatic engineering idea than tying applications to the network addressing. If you want every machine in the world to have a unique IPv4 address, you're walling yourself into IPv4 forever and ever. What you probably want is a unique identifier for each machine that does not bind you to a specific technology or transport.

Maybe a URL points directly to a machine on the Internet with a static IP address. Maybe it points to a machine behind a firewall with NAT. Maybe it points to an IPX machine on the otherside of a protocol coverter. If you can get the files via that URL, it shouldn't matter, should it? The problem is the current bad engineering practices that make the transport layer addressing entwined with the application layer resource addressing.

I don't care if the data flows over copper, fiber, or wireless, as long as the proper stream of bits get to the right place. Likewise, I shouldn't have to care if it is IP or anything else transporting the bits in particular.

Re:Using IP addresses as resource specifiers

[smallpaul]

Successful application protocols do not define their own address spaces from scratch. They always build on IP/DNS. This isn't poor engineering. It's separation of concerns.

You say:

Maybe a URL points directly to a machine on the Internet with a static IP address. Maybe it points to a machine behind a firewall with NAT. Maybe it points to an IPX machine on the otherside of a protocol coverter. If you can get the files via that URL, it shouldn't matter, should it?

Now I share the URL with someone on the other side of the planet in another administrative domain. Can I guarantee that they can access the resource? If and only if they speak the same protocol or have access to a gateway (which is from my point of view the same thing as speaking the protocol). What protocol do they have a 95% chance of speaking? IP. What other protocol comes close?

Sure, my application could support some other protocol, but then I have to convince the application developer on the other side to support that protocol also. For file transfer applications that's essentially impossible.

Here's a URL that doesn't use IP. It works great on my machine. I hope it is similarly useful to you!

Now if IP is totally unsuited for the application then we shouldn't use it for the actual conversation. But IP can certainly be the bootstrap that we used to negotiate a better protocol. If we can't negotiate that better protocol at least we can communicate why so the end-users know what is going on.

If your application consists primarily of transferring files without stringent latency issues, IP is fine and in fact HTTP is usually fine. Most devices have a need to transfer files, whether they are address books, musical ringers, or other configuration files. Can we agree that IP is the best solution by virtue of its ubiquity and simplicity?

Once IP is so-deployed, it also makes sense to use it as a boostrap into other protocols -- if you can handle the latency of the negotiation. IP (whether v4 or v6) is the protocol least likely to go away so using it as a boostrap frees your hand to experiment more easily with other kinds of protocols (e.g. streaming sound and video protocols which are always changing).

Both of these argue that IP really should be deployed everywhere. Anyhow, it is hardly worth arguing about. Before 1990 we lived in the world where there were dozens of competing protocols and applications had to explicitly bridge them. That world went away for a reason and it isn't coming back no matter what we conclude on Slashdot.

Re:Using IP addresses as resource specifiers

[Bookwyrm]

Oh, for goodness' sake. You miss the point entirely.

What I said was that for a given URL, which may very well be <http://someplace.com/>, how can you tell if it was IP end to end? You can't. PERIOD. The network is a black box -- you send a stream of bits out, you get a stream of bits back which have only a casual relationship to one another. The back end of the black box could be a webserver farm on an IP network, a bunch of Macs connected on AppleTalk, servers on IPX, or an IBM mainframe. How the heck can you tell what it runs if it only exposes IP to you? It has total control over the stream of bits it sends. It could make a traceroute through its network look like it was going to the moon! And the same URL will work fine for everyone as long as they can reach the gateway or 'server' the URL points to, but it does not require IP end-to-end. If you keep explicit IP addresses out of URLs, then you can have hostname based virtual web hosting, mail domains, and so on.

The point is that by keeping the network address out of the URL, you can be more flexible in what the URL resolves to. Maybe it resolves to IPv6, or maybe it resolves to IPv4, depending on what your system supports -- that is a superior solution, isn't it? That's the problem with using IP addresses as resource specifiers -- it's an inferior solution.

Re:Using IP addresses as resource specifiers

[smallpaul]

What I said was that for a given URL, which may very well be http://someplace.com/, how can you tell if it was IP end to end? You can't.

My browser makes an IP connection to "someplace.com". If it is gatewayed that's not an issue I care about. But that AppleTalk server can never serve data without the cooperation of that gateway. If they want to run an SMTP server, they are hosed. If they want to run a Jabber server, they are hosed. Disallowing people inside the firewall may be a perfectly good security policy but it doesn't make sense to deploy that security policy by merely neglecting to deploy IP. When you decide you want to loosen that security policy your hands will be tied.

If you keep explicit IP addresses out of URLs, then you can have hostname based virtual web hosting, mail domains, and so on.

If the IP address was in someplace.com it wouldn't stop the machine from gatewaying for some AppleTalk box. Apache does the gatwaying. It is as happy to gateway for an IP address as for a "host:" headers.

The point is that by keeping the network address out of the URL, you can be more flexible in what the URL resolves to. Maybe it resolves to IPv6, or maybe it resolves to IPv4, depending on what your system supports -- that is a superior solution, isn't it?

Look, hardly anyone goes around exposing URLs with IP addresses in them so you are attacking a straw man. The question is whether devices should be directly IP addressable or hidden behind NATs and proprietary protocols. The question has been answered by the market. People prefer to have DNS/IP addresses when they can get them and once IPv6 increases the number of them, people will ask for them and get them. And yes, that includes people's handheld computers and eventually cell phones. In particular any device that can run arbitrary code like a handheld computer should have an IP address so that it can run new IP-based protocols as they are invented.

Re:Using IP addresses as resource specifiers

[Bookwyrm]

Sigh.

Would I be wrong in assuming you feel that you could only run HTTP, SMTP, and such only on IP? If so, then there is not much point in discussing anything more.

Can you PING me now?

[wwwssabbsdotcom]

Just like in the commercial....How about now? Can you ping me now?

What's the point?

[Dirtside]

I've always understood that the big draw behind VOIP (I refuse to lowercase the O!) was that, given a fixed-rate internet connection, you could talk more or less forever without paying anything extra.

The thing is, my current cellphone plan is $30 a month, and with that I get 250 anytime minutes, 1000 night and weekend minutes, and free nationwide long-distance. And I've never used more than 200 minutes in a month. The service area is pretty good (AT&T Wireless), the service quality itself is pretty good, and my phone (Nokia 6162) is well-designed and easy to use. So what does VOIP offer me?

GSM

[Sverige]

That's what GSM is....an Open Platform/Common Platform that adhears to standards and specs. That being said I still find VoIP in the cell market useless

Re:GSM

[Sverige]

Actually I am for it if its a better use of spectrum when it is integrated with TDMA/CDMA/GSM/iDEN :-)

We've been doing this for years...

[Atryn]

FYI -- Nextel's Direct Connect radio feature is VoIP and has been for 10 years. This is why our network didn't go down in NYC on 9/11/2001... We don't touch the PSTN, which is what crashed and killed all cell phones and landlines.

IP version and NAT

[bigdavex]

However, as long as the masses believe there is some magic inherent in end-to-end un-NAT'ed networks, IPv4 will remain God, and IPv6, among other things, will never arrive. (It's not magic, it's bad design which requires end-to-end transport without allowing for the possibility of transport conversion.)

I don't follow this part. Aren't the alternatives IPv4 using NAT versus IPv6?

Re:IP version and NAT

[Bookwyrm]

How do you connect an IPv4 network to an IPv6 network without doing Network Address Translation to convert the IPv6 address into some IPv4 address the IPv4 network can handle? You need NAT between the two at least in order to transition from an IPv4 network to an IPv6 network. Of course, if applications break because they have not been properly written to deal with NAT, then they won't work across IPv6 and IPv4 network boundries.

So, if there is no NAT, what good is an IPv6 address? Until the rest of the Internet is converted over to IPv6, it's not going to be able to connect to much that is currently out there. This is not going to encourage most people to convert to IPv6 -- if applications are going to break if you don't have an IPv4 address, so you need to have one anyways, why bother with the IPv6 address at all? Just stay with the IPv4 one.