Slashdot Mirror
Motorola Plans Wi-Fi Cell Phones
Otto writes "This AP article over at CNN talks about Motorola's plans to create a cell phone that can seemlessly switch calls between cell networks and VoIP over WiFi, when it sees WiFi available to it. Thus reducing on call costs. Personally, I think it'd be cool just to have a cell phone that could use my own WiFi at home and be cellular when I'm out in the rest of the world."
How long would it take for someone to write a Windows program that made it as easy as executing it to listen in on people's conversations over Wi-Fi? Lots of public hot spots don't use WEP, you know.
Now cell phones will be wireless too!
Free Firefox news reader.
The article talks about all these low cost WiFi hotspots. We have a local college where you must be a student or faculty, a Borders where you can pay T-Mobile $30 a month, and that's about it. Or maybe they are talking about crusing the neighbourhood looking for unsecured home wireless connections? Hmmmmm!
Isn't this going to cause problems say when you walk by a company with lax wireless security and you unintentionally connect to their network and steal their services. Not saying I care but some one has to.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
Yes!
Hopefully this would finally be a way to escape the "at-home dead zone" when I try and use my mobile down in the basement and I can get rid of that silly land-line once and for all!
-AP
Is a cell phone that you could just plug into the wall when you're at home, and it would get both power and connection from there. In fact, I'd imagine someday people having one cell phone in their pocket, and maybe a "wired cell phone" in their homes, which would run off wall power and be more reliable since it wouldn't need a radio signal.
I wonder what kind of protocol it could use.. maybe firewire protocol over wi-fi, converted to frames that could be sent over a wire like ethernet. There could be some kind of power-over-ethernet to supply it with DC. Then it could run out to the street, where it would go into a tower and be converted into real wi-fi signals, except encapsulated in GSM data so it could use the existing cellular infrastructure. No that's no good, coverage is spotty. Maybe satellites could be involved. Could be expensive. Maybe it could run over DSL? Hey there's an idea!
Modern technology allows so many simple and elegant solutions to today's problems!
Gotta run, I'm working on my latest invention: a way to take ebooks and permanently output them onto sheets of paper. I think this will revolutionize the ebook industry!
Yet another way for people to snoop my phone conversations. I seriously doubt any encryption you could implement on a mobile phone's processor for transmitting voice would be more than trivial to crack. SSH yes, mobile banking, yes, but no way is there you can encrypt my voice conversation.
Suddenly the concept of wardriving has become a lot more interesting. "VoIP wireless hotspot" suddenly becomes synonymous with "Blackmail hole".
--
The last digit of pi is four.
This could seriously hurt cell phone service providers. With the growing popularity and widespread adoption of wi-fi everywhere, I wouldn't see a need to even have a provider. This is of course the phone is able to seamlessly jump from one wifi network to another - but then comes into consideration of reliable signals yadda yadda... It was only time for this to happen.
Hopefully this would finally be a way to escape the "at-home dead zone" when I try and use my mobile down in the basement and I can get rid of that silly land-line once and for all!
Cell providers already have "mini tower" equipment they can set up in their stores to assure that they never have an embarassing dead spot at their own retail location. They even set those up at business sites to assure an otherwise uncoverable corperate campus gets hit with signal.
I guess it was only a matter of time until they converted such units to a home game model...
You missed the point:
The last people who want this to work are the big carriers.
(looking up IDTs stock price...)
ring tone downloads at 54Mbps!
Just FYI, Ericsson and others have had dual-mode DECT/GSM phones since the late 90's and adoption has not been spectacular.
These phones allow you to roam indoors on a DECT local digital connection to your landline and roam outside (or in large buildings) with seamless handover between DECT base stations. They also doubled as GSM but I don't think the handover was automatic, see:
http://www.dectweb.com/Products/dual_mode.htm
-- Sig meltdown immine...
Actually a lot of cell phones have huge processing power that goes totally unused, not to mention that this would be on NEW devices. Think your 10 day standby time is good on a cell phone? There are wireless digital handsets in use in hospitals and universities that get 70 - 80 days of standby (even 150), why? Because they don't have the fancy processors and memory modern game play'n, websurf'n voice dial'n cell phones do. When you're sitting on the can playing Push-Push you're using more CPU than it would take to compress a voice stream.
Encrypting a stream text or voice doesn't much matter it's about data rate not content, when you get a lag in an SSL terminal in virtually every case it's not the cryptography that's causing the delay. Modern public/privet key cryptography scales pretty well for various data rates. The rate of your digital voice conversation on your cell phone is pretty low (which is why it sounds like crystal clear 8 bit crap).
Not to mention that you'd only need to start a new encrypted once and a while (to your provider not the WiFi Network) and NOT every time you make a call. Who cares if someone listens in on your traffic on the WiFi if it's just gibberish going to the Cell company any ways? Or did you think by any means your cell company would let you move to VoIP and connect to anyone OTHER than them?
Puleeze these people practically invented sinister strangle hold service.