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?

[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...

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.

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...

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

[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.

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?

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

[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.

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?