Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
The only good weather is bad weather.