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

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

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?