Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

VoIP Cell Phones Coming

Posted by timothy on from the when-oh-when dept.

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."

1 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. The obvious answer: convergence by tlambert · · Score: 5, Informative

    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