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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."
"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.
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.
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...
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