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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."
...but "wifi" is a STUPID acronym.
The proper name is 802.11b. "Wifi" is meaningless marketroid-speak. (Or in this case, slash-speak since the slashdot editors insist on spouting "wifi" at every given chance).
Better hope that they don't invent "wifi anime"...
Doesn't this mean that cellphone congestion will now lead to degraded wifi performance?
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
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.
I guess VoIP over WLAN won't do much to their current markets, since high bandwidth isn't an issue for voice. But it seems they've lost the battle for data even before it's started...
Or can commercial UMTS and open WLAN coexist?
I think we will find that WIFi is too much of a power drain in its current guise but techonologies like Bluetooth which have been designed with VOIP in mind to a certain extent should work better and allow you to make calls which last longer than 10 mins.
Cellphones are already cheap enough, and may get even more cheap if this 802.11 thing works.
My 15 years old cousin uses it mainly to date chicks. His phone costed him about $100 and he spends around $20 a month in calls. For the same price, you can get him anytime, and he can call, for example, if he had problems with his bike.
Get real.
"Computer users... those arrogant yuppies. If they have so much office work to do, why don't they hire a secretary?"
Seamless handoff between 802.11 and CDMA was demonstrated at the recently concluded CDMA Americas congress.
Motorola is in trouble because they are missing the 3G-boat in a big way. Their infrastructure implementations of both 1xRTT and WCDMA suck, and they are getting no orders. They have chosen not to implement 1xEV-DO. So right now, they have no data solution to offer their customers. They are coasting based on their handset sales, and their proprietary lock on Nextel. This announcement is just another tactic to muddy the waters and to buy them time from relentless competition from Nortel, Lucent and Samsung.
Magnus.Or even better, why can't Slashdot just call up the New York Times and ask to become a partner as well? This site must drive more traffic to nyt.com then just about any other partner (they get slashdotted, what?, once or twice a day, which means upward toward half a million hits) and it's readers are notoriously anti-registration.
This isn't about getting high-speed data on to your cell phone, it's about using your cell phone with your office telephony servers.
Imagine being on a conference call at your office. You tap a button on your fancy Avaya 4620 IP hard phone, and your cell phone rings. you pick up and it's your conference call, coming through IP over the 802.11 network. You continue to listen on your cell using NO 'plan' minutes at all since this is your campany's private network, until you decide to go to Taco Bell. When you drop out of range of your office WLAN, voila - automatic handoff to the cell network. You return and you're back on the 802.11 network.
The point folks, is that if we do this right, you won't even _need_ a desk phone... Unless you want one.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?