Skype-Ready Phones From Motorola

Hack Jandy writes "Seamlessly integrating VoIP and GSM might not be a fantasy after all, as Motorola announced their decision to build cell phones and handsets that have Skype Internet Telephony integrated into the devices. Obviously, one could use Skype for outgoing calls near wi-fi hotspots (essentially free) but default on GSM for outgoing calls in areas that lack coverage."

Comments

Article Text

[perlionex]

Motorola to Build "Skype Ready" Cell Phones, Headsets.
Handset Maker Motorola to Build Skype into Phones
by Anton Shilov

Motorola, a leading maker of mobile phones, and Skype, a leading Internet telephony company, said this week at 3GSM World Congress that Motorola would launch a lineup of products that are dubbed "Skype Ready", including cell phones and handsets.

The two companies will explore opportunities broadly across both companies, leveraging Motorola's strength in seamless mobility, advanced technologies, mobile devices and accessories and Skype's rapidly-growing global user base and rich voice and messaging communication tools. The initial focus of the collaboration will be on co-marketing of new optimized Motorola "Skype Ready" companion products, such as Bluetooth headsets, dongles, and speakerphones, as well as delivery of the Skype Internet Telephony experience on "select Motorola mobile devices".

Peculiarities and specifications of "Skype Ready" products were not touched upon.

Skype takes communications to a new and global era with its free, multi-faceted and rich communication tools, enabling users to make free, or very cheap, voice calls and rich messaging connections via the Internet. Skype currently has more than 25 million registered users.

While headsets, dongles and speakerphones are natural enhancements for PCs or PDAs that have Skype installed on them, cell phones with Skype capability may usher a new era in mobile communications, as whenever users have Internet access, e.g., via WLAN or GPRS, they will be able to make long-distance calls at a price much lower compared to that offered by cellular network operators. Still, the cost of GPRS traffic from some operators particularly in the EU is very high and may limit benefits Skype provides in terms of cost.

Motorola "Skype Ready" companion products are expected to be available in the first half of 2005.

Re:Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck getting major carriers to pick these phones up.
This creates direct competition with regular cell service.
With an unsubsidized price, I don't think most people will find this option very attractive.

Of course, this could also prove to be a tool for the Wireless carriers to help potential customers drop their landlines. If your house has wifi then you don't need to worry about cell minutes.

I wonder how this will end up and how much they will cost.

Re:Article Text

[luvirini]

In many parts of the world it is actually the enduser that buys their phone, they do not come as part of any "package" or "plan".

Great for college!

[toetagger1]

We got wifi here in most places. Be it academic, residential housing, or in appartments. Even most employers have wireless infrastructure now. Could this be a major threat to the current telecommunication infrastructure and the breaktrhough for Skype and VoIP?

New server?

[perlionex]

From their website's about page:

We are really very happy with this server solution, because it does show very high stability, reliability and performance. I believe that you can notice it yourselves by the short time it takes to load X-bit's pages today... We have had good experience with this server and see it working reliably and fast...

Let's see how well their MSI MS-9204 2U server stands up against a /.ing... :p

Wi-Fi is mostly free now...

[Jonboy X]

But for how much longer will local restaurants let people suck up all the bandwidth that is supposed to be serving all of the customers?

For that matter, how much bandwidth does a Skype VoIP call actually use?

Re:Wi-Fi is mostly free now...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm talking on skype right now and DU Meter says it's using 3.9 kBytes/s up and down.

Re:Wi-Fi is mostly free now...

[Digital11]

Judging from DU meter activity while on a Skype call, about 5KB/s up & down. Add 5KB/s for each user on a conference.

Avian accessibility

[African Grey]

Is there a possibility that there will be some kind of accessory to make these phones more parrot-friendly? Some variation of the hands-free devices some of you humans use while driving would work well. As you probably know, my species is very talkative and it would be great to be able to chat long-distance without paying a wing and a leg to do so.

does it.........

[SETY]

Does it:
A) Hand off from Skype to GSM network when you go out of WiFi range?

B) Spoof call waiting when you are on Skype?

If it doesn't do these things it is fairly irrelevant for business.

[OT] is there any opensource equivalent of Skype?

[Anonymous Coward]

Skype is doing really well in term of technology. Do they have competitors with as good tech? How about open source?

skype eh?

[froggero1]

I've been using skype for quite a while now, and even though it looks pretty cool, and the phones you can get are slick, until they support incoming calls with it, I can't really see it taking off.

I know it's just supposed to be a replacement for long distance charges, but come on people, start becoming full-on VOIP!

Or maybe I'm wrong, maybe you can get incoming (not skype-to-skype, an actual phone number) calls.

Non-free hotspots?

[arc.light]

I don't suppose the phone can be configured to automatically login to a fee-based hotspot service like T-Mobile? Bringing up a browser on the phone and keying in the username and password each time would be a pain.

And you can use the phone as a PHONE!

[ABeowulfCluster]

Not only does it play MP3's, act as a PDA, GPS, Navigator, Camera, Game Pod, RFID gizmo, but you can use it as a COMMUNICATIONS DEVICE!

Call ANYWHERE without GSM

[mboverload]

Do not forget the bounty of unsecured networks around the nation. Drive up to someone's house and you get a free call.

If they don't care enough to lock down their connection, then it is free for the taking.

It's almost there.

[smartsaga]

If Motorola is making it then it might just happen.

Most of you out there are thinking that it will require a WiFi hot spot, maybe it does. Now, what about the possibility of the internet becoming a public service like the street cleaning or garbage collection, just saying, that it will become a part of our every day lives, it will be available everywhere. If it becomes available everywhere, then most mobile phone service providers will include internet service free of charge or low cost. Paying a low monthly fee and being able to make long distance calls under that same fee sounds good to me.

Now, can somebody make a Point to Point tunnel with SSH for phones so that uncle sam can't packet sniff your conversation about whether you are going to wear a tin foil hat or not in your birth-day with a giant penguin coming out of the cake?

Have a good one.

Please do not use Skype!

[hairyface]

Dear Consumer, Skype have based their products on a proprietary protocol. They hope to corner the market, and if they succeed in that aim, their services will not remain free. If you care about the future of VOIP, go with any other solution (even if it's currently less slick, technically), using the open SIP protocol. The choices you make as a consumer (even of so-called "free" products) determine our future.

Re:Please do not use Skype!

[Raphael]

SIP is a crappy protocol that any person with an ounce of concern for security would look very long and hard at before using.

You are of course aware of the recommendation to use SIP over IPSec or TLS, right? So what are your security concerns, exactly?

In fact, I believe that the implementation of SIP in the mobile world (using the 3GPP standard IMS) makes it mandatory to use IPSec or TLS with SIP. SIP may not be perfect, but I think that the current best practices for its deployment are taking care of most of the issues.

I welcome Skype's technology. Hopefully it will drive innovation for standards based protocols.

I doubt that it will. They are using proprietary protocols and they made it clear that they do not intend to standardize. Not only that, but they also designed the Skype clients in such a way that they must check for updates and always run the latest version before being able to communicate with others. So they could change the protocols as soon as someone manages to reverse-engineer them.

Skype's technology is nice and works well. But if you value standards, open source and compatibility between multiple applications, then you should look at Skype with a more critical eye. You do not have to - it's your choice in the end.

Re:Please do not use Skype!

[Gadzinka]

Unfortunatelly, Skype is the only VoIP product that "just works" in today's Internet with all the NATs and firewalls.

SIP is as crappy and NAT unfriendly as you can get with separate signalling and payload channels. Think sending information about voice payload endpoint to the party from behind the NAT device you don't control. You can get around some of those problems going through proxies etc, but such proxy would became major chokepoint, since lots of clients would communicate through it instead of talking directly to each other. IAX would be much better choice here.

You see, I install and maintain commercial VoIP (SIP, IAX) solutions for a living, but when it comes to advising other people on how to talk via Internet with their technologically challenged relatives, I always tell them to use Skype. It "just works", no matter how fucked up their net connection is.

Now, one could devise a similar P2P system, based on some open protocol like IAX (with the way SIP works it would be rather impossible), that would immitate inner workings of Skype. If it materialises, let me know.

They hope to corner the market, and if they succeed in that aim, their services will not remain free.

They already have a legitimate, sustainable income source. The moment they started charging for "basic" services, bundling spyware etc, people would stop using it. I know I would.

Robert

Essentially already done.

[jededeck]

Anyone with a PocketPC Phone Edition with WiFi capability, such as the Qtek 9090 or the HP IPAQ h6315, can already do this, because Skype has a version available for download for the PocketPC. A more interesting question is: What will phone operators do who provide mobile flat-fee internet packages (I heard some are already doing this in the U.S.A.), since phoning with Skype becomes free then any place any time where you have a GSM signal. I am not sure if the bandwidth available with GPRS is enough for Skype to run smoothly (does anyone know this?), however UMTS (a broadband version of GPRS is coming soon).

And in other news...

[supabeast!]

Verizon, MCI, Cingular, T-Mobile, and Virgin all announced plans to disable this feature before selling the phones to customers.

Why would they bother with !skype

[awehttam]

Why on earth would Motorola or any of the other telecomms equipment manufacturers support standardized VoIP protocols. It's not like they're in the business to help us communicate better for the sake of helping us communicate better.

Skype, sure. It's a truly alternative internet-based voice medium that doesn't directly compete with incumbment provider/pstn networks. No +1 NPA NNX NNNN dialing or anything Aunt Tilly would be used to.

I just don't see why they would shoot themselves in the foot by supporting SIP, IAX or MGCP.

People Keep Talking

[foo fighter]

People keep talking about VOIP like its a standard. But it's not.

Try using off-brand phones on a Cisco VOIP network. Try using any regular phone on your home VOIP network.

It just doesn't work.

Maybe this Motorola phone works on the Skype network. (I wouldn't bet on it based on my past experiences with Motorola as well as Skype.)

But what about your open source, small office/home office/home VOIP setup? It's not gonna work! Until we have some real standards and maturity in the VOIP industry we aren't going to have voice over internet protocal (VOIP) we can really trust to work when we need it.

Re:[OT] is there any opensource equivalent of Skyp

[Zemran]

Without wanting to start a flame war, I feel that Skype is the AOL of VoIP and there are many better services to use if you want. Skype is proprietory and does not adhere to the SIP standard in the same way that AOL was in the BBS days. I would hope that these phones will happily work with normal SIP services and are configurable as such. I use Gossiptel and use it to call friends that are on other SIP services, for free, without any problems, I just dial ** followed by their service providers code and then their number. Skype is for Skype users and those wanting to make cheap breakout calls, I want to call anyone including breakout calls.