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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."
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.
/rant
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.
Great. Just Great. First it was downloadable ring tones. Now it'll be customized voice filters. I can just see the advertisement now:
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?
"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.
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...
Is this thing on?
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
I'd rather have phones that worked really well first. I'm tried of having half of my calls dropped.
"Oh no, 3 horny women and only 2 condoms...Thank god I read slashdot"
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.
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?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
the *AA's won't stop you from using it...they'll make you pay per use of each catch phrase...
...and down on the line...
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
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
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.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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?
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.
ideas should be free
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?
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 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.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Think about... this could pave the way for secure cell phones. If you have access to the bits, you can encrypt them...
Ryan
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.
:) graha dot ms at graha dot ms
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
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?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
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.
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.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
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.
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! ;)
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
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
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?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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.
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.
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.
I don't follow this part. Aren't the alternatives IPv4 using NAT versus IPv6?
-Dave