Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Merging WiFi VoIP Into Cellular Service

Posted by timothy on from the mix-and-match dept.

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."

3 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. um by serps · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  2. Death of UMTS by Koos+Baster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  3. This has been done by other vendors already. by Magnus+Pym · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.