Slashdot Mirror
Merging WiFi VoIP Into Cellular Service
Anonymous Coward writes "The New York Times (registration required) reports that
Motorola, Proxim and Avaya are expected to announce today that they will jointly develop technology to allow wireless communications to jump between networks without interruption.
This appears to involve making use of WiFi for phone service where it's available, thus converting WiFi hotspots into congestion relief for overloaded cellular networks, and, of course, making cell phones into WiFi terminals."
If your business is SO important that you have to be available every fucking minute of the day, then stay at your office for chrissake and use a landline (that way you don't have to shout, you know)!
WLAN just doesn't have the range. A 3G or even GPRS cell can cover many miles, WLAN hasn't a hope of ever getting that range omnidirectionally. (Is that a word?)
There is... It's called TCP/IP. It can run on Ethernet, WLAN, ATM, GPRS, tunneled through PPP, SSH...
Why reinvent the wheel?
A general purpose physical layer protocol is unlikely though. IMHO anyway.
.: Max Romantschuk
Cellular operators perceive WiFi as a threat, because there has been long feared that cheap, community operated wireless networks ("guerilla networks" in corporate speak) would wipe out operators own WiFi offerings. What seems to anger operators most is that the whole concept of local wireless networks is not in line with the operators' idea of monetizing every single byte transmitted over the air. Also operators feared that someone would come up with an VoIP-WLAN phone that would offer very cheap voice calls in the WLAN range. WLAN networks.
Now the impact of this new device (and system) that this partnership is going to produce depends on whether it would be oriented towards operators (and would thus require deep integration with GSM operator's infrastructure) or rather corporate customers (and would therefore be more like an software over-the-Internet VPN solution but also for voice communication). I think the first option is more likely and then the operators would be in position to control to some extent the WiFi market with local WLAN operators reduced to being just local bandwidth providers. The most important part of making this work would be the SIM card (or its equivalent) identifying the user and interfaces connecting a registry of users to authentication mechanisms of various visited networks. Most of that is what GSM operators already have.
I'm sure this is what telcos have seen coming and have been scared shitless of. This will prevent them from ever making UMTS into a commercial success, especially taking into account they payed far to much for licensing the (yet-to-be-used) UMTS frequencies.
UMTS is already dead and buried - and everybody in the industry understood that shortly after last UMTS licenses were sold for crazy piles of money. The system discussed in the article won't change the picture that much - UMTS promise didn't concern voice calls (these are quite well served by the GSM system) but rather multimedia transmissions.
Also, spread of cheap WLAN connectivity not controlled by telecoms is only one of the reasons why UMTS is dead. Main reason is that it turned out that people at large are quite happy with just calling and sending short messages and are not interested in paying lots of money for fancy phones and then for multimedia content. All analysts agree that it will take time before significant number of customers would be interested in what UMTS promised.
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
What IS it with you Americans? Everyone else has one standard, that works fine, gives us all the features that Joe Consumer is seen to want, call handoffs between networks is invisible - Joe Consumer doesne have to know a thing about cells and which network is currently carryng their call.
GSM GSM GSM GSM GSM GSM GSM GSM. Pah.
This is hardly the death of UMTS. Of course, I'm an engineer, so the techical terms may not be the same ones used by the public at large.
:))
Anyway, in upcoming UMTS versions (starting from rel 5 I believe), the UMTS network can actually use WLAN as an access technology. It can also use xDSL, for that matter. The "old" WCDMA is of course still there.
The basic idea is to converge all those different networks so that telcos that act also as ISPs don't need duplicate systems for user accounts and stuff. This way there can also be easier integration (access your mail account from your phone WITHOUT any hassle -> everything is configured into your subscriber SIM card) and stuff like that.
Actually, the official position for most telcos deploying UMTS (as in "WCDMA") seems to be that they are back to their original plans. Original meaning the same plans they had before the IT boom. The boom was supposed to speed things up a bit => well, it did not, and everyone lost some money, but what the hell, show must go on.
(Disclaimer: I may have myself confused some of the terminology above. Currently I'm 100% certain only of the "IMT-2000" umbrella term
There is no way you're going to be able to stuff an 802.11b/a transceiver into an already high priced, low battery life phone.
I see no reason why not. I dont know where you are coming from when you say high priced and low battery life.
First, they have 802.11b tranceivers in the compact flash and memory stick form factors. They dont cost that much to manufacture, certainly less than $100. Im sure the 802.11 technology would be even smaller and cheaper if it were designed for a high volume (im avoiding the phrase "mass produced" since mass production has been superceded by lean production) cell phone design.
Im guessing an 802.11 tranceiver would require less power than a phone...not more because, in general, you are much closer to your WiFi access point than you are a cell tower.
Next, 802.11b is likely much cheaper to implement than a custom designed cell phone based on the ARM processor... Ive worked in that industry and can tell you that every single handset is unique and represents millions of dollars in development costs. Standardizing on 802.11 could save a lot of money for the handset manufacturers.
Finally, the real cost savings would be in the distributed network infrastructure. No cell phone towers to maintain. Just route calls through public access points. When you think of the billions of dollars wasted on the 3G networks, WiFi is like a free/cheap 3G infrastructure that is building itself all over the world.
Cell phone companies trying to screw over customers, freenets. News at 11.
They want to use 802.11 networks to "relieve congestion on cell-phone towers." In other words, "we don't like building new towers. I know, let's use the WiFi network that our customers are paying for to cheap out!" This will, of course, dramatically increase the load on the the WiFi networks, increasing the cost of commercial ones and making FreeNets more expensive to run. Your cell-phone service stays at the same price, though. This is remarkably dishonest.
Hopefully it'll backfire and people will just start using dedicated VoIP services once they realize that they're paying for the network anyway. It'll still hurt FreeNets, but at least it'll smack down the telco monopolies.
I'm ok with my voice being xmitted over the carrier's network but this is a little disconcerting. What degree of privacy is afforded by a random public access point operated by some random individual? Isn't WiFi really a shared medium? think:WarEavesdropping. I sincerely hope this concern is being addressed.
-Jeff
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
...but does that mean that the phone companies are going to use /our/ wifi points when they get congested?
I mean, in a couple of years it's concievable that we use palmpilots or ppc's with VoIP in combination with wifi to get in touch with each other (in the same kind of way that ICQ has worked....when enough people use it, it crosses a critical threshhold and becomes useable for the masses), using, I dunno: URL's or something as phonenumbers.
All it takes is one in five geeks in a city to buy a good wifi point and someone to write good switching software, and you have a free urban VoIP telephone service. Then maybe use some good geek's T1 line to connect the wifi network in that city to the internet, and you can patch multiple wifi networks together, creating a secondary, free, VoIP telephone network.
It just seems to me we need more wifi points, more PDA's and a switching protocol to get free telephony to other geeks like us....or am I making a huge mistake in my thinking?
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Well, O'REILLY uses Wi-Fi in thier book "802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide" when refering to 802.11 in general, so it's good enough for me.
I don't go around calling my Ethernet network a "slightly modified 802.3 network"
All it means is that the technology has gone mainstream. Would you rather have it called 802.11b, if it meant that it wasn't popular? Which of course means there are no hot-spots and the hardware cost 10 times more. Your choice.