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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."
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
So you can have the underwater sound of a regular cellphone, combined with the intermittent stuttering of VoIP.
Just take the cellphone out of the picture entirely
- Sig
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...
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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.
Actually, in Canada, Telus already had an unlimited calling plan in the city of Winnipeg. It was $30 CDN a month, unlimited local calling all the time. It was their marketing gimmick to get into a new market. The only problem is, due to their contact the user is entitled to renew their contract when it expires for the same plan ad infinitum. This has led to those cell phone plans being bought and sold for as much as $3000, since as long as you renew it, you've got an unlimited cellphone for life for $30.
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.