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."

Comments

Pause Feature

[Myriad]

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.

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.

Re:Pause Feature

[DarkHelmet]

Let me try and adapt the form to the phone companies. It's a joke... laugh...

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to changing the phone system. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other
flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

(X) Most phone users will not put up with punching letters on a keypad (SMS anyone)
(X) Phone companies will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from phone companies
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Public reluctance
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(X) Susceptibility of protocols to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Technically illiterate politicians

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Killing phone companies is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Re:Great - there goes free unlimited in network ca

[CyberDave]

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