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VOIP Meets Cell Phones
pnutjam writes "This looks really interesting. It looks like this company, Xcelis, has a bunch of cellphones hooked to VOIP equipment. Basically you pay them and if you have free in-network calling on your phone you call their phone and then dial out to whomever you want. Voila, unlimited calling to anyone."
I hope this doesn't become too popular! Companies will have to raise prices elsewhere.
When will the wireless networks give us unlimited plans as an option... that's what I want to know. VoIP is too buggy... there are numbers that you can't call and faxes don't like it.
00101010
This is very inconvenient, because it essentially makes the addressbook on my cell phone useless. I'd love to have something that just automatically routes calls through them. That would definately add to the value of their service.
This, and what about incoming calls? I believe most cell phone companies still count your # of minutes based on people calling you, as well as your outbound calls.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I suspect the cell phone companies user contract will contain a provision prohibiting you from dialing a service such as this.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
So you can have the underwater sound of a regular cellphone, combined with the intermittent stuttering of VoIP.
At first I thought this sounded interesting for international calls, but now I see that international calls are not permitted, at least during the trial period. Am I the only one who can't figure out what this is for? I have free long distance on all my mobile phone minutes. I have unlimited calling on off-peak hours and more anytime minutes than I would possibly want to spend on my phone in a given month. Looking at the other plans my provider offers, I'd bet you couldn't even take advantage of some of them unless you had an extra battery for your phone. Who is the target market for this?
Breakfast served all day!
Just take the cellphone out of the picture entirely
- Sig
You could do this for yourself or for a small company which is a great idea!
when skype release their linux version with a d-bus API it will be possible to do this yourself.
I see what you mean, but just because it doesn't cost the companies anything doesn't mean they won't raise prices to make more money if they know lots of people are using it.
Slackware
Verizon can and is terminating accounts of people using this service. Others will follow suit...
The providers know about this service and hate it, and also have enough money to crush it. So don't plan on umlimited minute plans for the time being.
Not necessarily... while it would no longer be as simple as entering the number of the person you want to call, many phones will let you daisy chain them with a Pause feature. This feature tells the autodialer to wait n number of seconds (or half seconds or what have you for the particular phone) before dialing more numbers.
So you set it up to dial your access number, say 702-555-1212. You want it to then call your destination number, say 613-555-1234. You would then program the phone to dial:
702-555-1212,,,,613-555-1234
(the comma representing whatever character your phone uses to indicate a pause).
This way the phone dials the access number, waits a few seconds to let that call process and the service connect, then dials your destination number.
You could even insert access codes if necessary with additional pauses if need be (ie code 1234):
702-555-1212,,,1234,,,,613-555-1234
It is more work to setup, and you'd need to figure out what sort of delay you needed, but otherwise it should work. The ability to pause and enter more digits has been built into many phones for years...
Blockwars: Free, multiplayer, head to head game.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
This is nothing new, Verizon already uses Voip on the back-end of their cellphone network, although most people don't know that. VZ is converting their entire telephony network to a managed IP network and all call legs are slowly being converted to Voip/Sip. So that means for cell phones, the switch at the tower does the conversion of voice to IP, and the end-user is never the wiser. Now a cell phone that has a sip stack is an entire different thing, and that is being worked on. In other words there are two Voip implementations: one, where you have Voip from the phone you use (has an Ip address, etc), and two the transitional where you get a typical phone and that is converted to IP down-stream. So cell phones these days can connect to an IP network, browse online, etc. once that is more standard you will start to see cell phones that have optional soft-phones built-in aka SIP plus RTP stacks.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
They use caller id to identify you so no need for pin codes, and they have an online phone book with speed dial. I'm using skypeout to call from home and bigzoo from my cell and pay on average
Wow, 45 comments and not a single one bemoaning the privacy issues? What has become of Slashdot?
If you sign up for this service, Xcelis will be in a fantastic position of keeping track of ALL the calls you make through your cellphone. Who you called, how long you talked to them, perhaps even what you talked about. Hmmm, Xcelis might just be a front for the American Spy Agency^W^W^W Dept of Homeland Security.
I have Vonage VoIP service at home on a cable modem connection. When I talk to a cell phone user over my VoIP phone, there is a noticable lag that occurs. I've gotten used to it, but initially my wife and I found ourselves talking over each other all the time because of the 1-2 second delay. It sounds to me like this service will only compound that problem.
Check THIS out: http://bobanddavid.com/cinco.html
CINCO!!
Of course it costs them something. Why would I sign up for a 2000 minute plan when I can get unlimited calling to anyone on my 300 minute plan?
All they'll accomplish is eliminating unlimited mobile to mobile minutes for everyone. The cell company isn't going to take a loss or provide service for free. Currently, the mobile to mobile minutes are more of a gimmick to get the friends/family of their customers to switch than anything. If this ceases to be an incentive because services like this make it irrelevant then they'll stop offering them.
Mike
A bill to outlaw this type of service will be written by one or many cellular providers and presented to one or many congresstools in 3...2...1...
I think you should rephrase. Companies will raise prices elsewhere. They already charge more than they have to for the disservice. However, if they feel they can milk a little more out of you, you know they will.
I have "unlimited" night and weekend minutes and "unlimited" mobile to mobile minutes on my Cingular plan. When I looked at my usage online a few months ago, it turns out that I indeed did not have truly unlimited airtime: I had 99999 N/W and 99999 M2M minutes each month. Of course, this is more than twice the number of actual minutes in any given month, so there was no way I would ever exceed those minutes, so they were in fact unlimited to me. Now that I've added my brother and sister as additional lines on my plan and we draw from the same minute pool, it would be possible for us to exhaust all those minutes, but we would each have to spend 16 hours a day on the phone. Not gonna happen. That, and it was probably easier to program the billing system with a very high threshold for "unlimited" plans and not worry about it rather than programming truly unlimited minutes.
CyberDave
I agree that this will likely have a short shelf life. The extreme # of minutes on their cell phones will stand out like a flashing beacon to the cell carriers.
But, a "home version" would be interesting. Two phones with the minimal accounts for unlimited mobile to mobile would still be cheaper than one of the mega minute plans. A kit to connect your "home" cell phone to your Vonage box would do the trick. The cell carriers wouldn't see the insane #'s of minutes on a service providers accounts but just you calling your other phone often. A slick trick would be to allow bi-directional calling with this kit.
In early days of PacBell GSM here in CA they had 1st incoming minute free. I had my SIM in a box with a GPS receiver attached. I could call from a land line every minute, poll for position, hang up under a minute. One month I made 1800 sub-minute calls to my mobile to track my cars location.
They later ammended the plan to not include data calls and then scrapped the 1st minute plan all together, but I got a lot of testing in before they did.
Yes, A bunch of fixed wireless nodes wired into their VOIP switches is exactly what they are doing. I have been expecting someone to do this...would have done it myself if I had the facilities & resources to get it started.
It's still a pretty cheesy solution though. What we really need is for the Cellular providers to setup VOIP gateways directly to their private networks (preferably with IAX2 protocol as an option to work with asterisk http://www.asterisk.org/) and then I can broker calls to or from my cell phone, the traditional phone network, or any VIOP network as I please using my asterisk switch. The cell phone provider could charge a small monthly fee to those who want to use the gateway to cover their (relatively minor) costs of providing it and probably make a bit too and everybody could be happy. Are you listening VERIZON...AT&T...NEXTEL? I would think it would be a boon for NEXTEL as their many business & government customers could further integrate their wired and wireless communications making those accounts very happy and almost turnover-proof. Plus NEXTEL could offer services for setting up their clients with this technology integration for a nice hourly rate.
It's pretty obvious this is a really dumb idea. Most of the previous responses have detailed the reasons why.
What I really see is PDA phones having WIFI or better yet, WIMAX, connecting to a network and doing VOIP that way, thereby completely bypassing the cell phone company.
That way, when you have WIFI, you call for free (or very low cost). When you don't have WIFI coverage, you dial out using the cell phone network.
Now THAT'S cell phone VOIP! Not this load of crap lol.
eTrade SUCKS
On a back end web server listening on a re-directed port along with a password and you're prompted with: ...and then the "old" modem in that computer taps C-Kermit and dials specifically: ,19998887777,,,,5,!,*97,15554443333,,;
:), flashes the line, dials my transfer code (*97) and dumps me to the phone number I entered.
... as long as I can tap a web browser somehow. :)
ENTER CURRENT #: (let's enter 19998887777)
TRANSFER TO #: (let's enter 15554443333)
atdt
So, it calls me (pauses due to finding the cell phone I may be holding), dials "5" for the heck of it (lets me know it is working
Free unlimited calls anywhere I go already
With the new flexible pricing plan from Sprint PCS, additional blockes of 100 anytime minutes are just 5 cents a minute. At $9.95 per month, that's 200 extra minutes from Sprint. How many people really need more than 200 additional peak minutes on their plans? And as others have mentioned, the call quality of these "free" minutes is gonna suck.
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Everyone has seen the advertising. Plans are sold with free unlimited in-network calling. If you read the boilerplate in your service agreement, you'll see something that reads (paraphrased) abuse of the network (re:unlimited free calling) is subject to termination.
Unlimited free in-network calling doesn't mean UNLIMITED. It means unlimited until they choose to see otherwise, labelling it as "abuse" of their network. They have the right to terminate you for such abuse.
What kind of abuse? It is up to your provider. Don't like it? Walk away. Or live with it. Most people don't abuse it. But there are plenty that try.
-- No sig for you!
Why don't they just do this with 2 different mobile networks: two sets of phones (1 set from each network with free in-network calls), connected in pairs through their gateway? Then they can market free calls to each network's subscribers, without relying on iffy VoIP, with its lower quality and smaller market of tightwadder customers? I smell a pure, unscalable gimmick.
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make install -not war