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Cringely Shows How to Get Free Cell Calls
SafariShane writes "In this week's pulpit, Bob describes how to properly use new software from a company called IPDrum. Basically, you use the free mobile-to-mobile feature of any major carrier to call a dedicated cell phone attached to your computer. That call is then connected to Skype, allowing you to make free cell calls just about anywhere. Just how long till someone does this on a large scale, by overselling the dedicated lines, and starts selling true unlimited cell plans?"
How is it free when Skype charges for calls to landlines and cell phones?
But not very cost-effective if you're the only one using it.
2x cheapest cell plan is still about $60-70. For that much money, you can almost buy unlimited minutes (or at least practically unless you talk non-stop) from the cell provider.
For a family or group of friends, however, this sounds like a great deal.
"I turn away with fright and horror from the lamentable evil of functions which do not have derivatives."
Good point. On my Verizon service there is a noticable lag of almost one second (at times) within their network. So multiply that by send and recieve and add to that any delay in Skype, and you might have some bizarre conversations.
He goes on to suggest that investors should move their money away from phone companies to NeuStar -- a company that vends telephone numbers.
Cough.
It seems to me that the obvious place to converge points of content would be email addresses -- which will make phone numbers obsolete as well.
Well, it sounds good on the surface, but starts getting a little muddier when you get into it.
How much does your average cell phone provider charge for a month of service? Let's be generous and say $30, plus $10 for the "in network" plan. So, $40 right there.
Next, you add the regularly poor quality of a cell phone call, with its drop outs in sound, etc. to the equally (if not moreso) poor quality of a VoIP call, and you end up with a lot of "huh? what? can you hear me now?" in your conversations.
People who tend to spend so much time on their cell phone that they go over the costs associated with having the second phone line value value their ability to communicate and won't tolerate the kind of frustrations with this "cheap" solution.
Seems like you'd need to be spending a LOT of time calling international to make this worthwhile.
A cable between the phone and PC running Skype is too narrow of a focus. The "home version" rather than someone trying to make a service buisness out of sounds better.
Give me a bluetooth adapter than plugs into my POTS phone jack and communicates with the phone. This could be a regular phone line, or VOIP like Vonage. Then I can call out via link, or have incoming calls get transferred as well. As far as the cell company is concerned, I'm making a bunch of calls to the wife.
Incoming should be fairly easy, all incoming calls to the home line get sent to a pre-configured number in the home cell phone. Outbound might be trickier since you'd have to tell the home cell phone what number to dial out.
I'm sure it's coming soon, but a Skype-only solution that takes a cable, that's not all that exciting
You might find that connecting the cellphone to the bridge device contradicts some term in the contract. If they figure out that this is what you're doing, they might decide to hit you with $0.50/min for all the "breach of contract" minutes, or something similarly evil.
The mobile-to-mobile minutes are free for two reasons. First, they don't have to pay a termination fee for moving the call to someone else's network. Second, it's a sales tool to get your friends to sign up. By doing this, you sabotage the second goal, and they'll try everything possible to make your life miserable.
The opportunity here is not for you to have a second phone tethered to your computer, but for some person to set up a bank of phones tied to broadband for each mobile phone carrier. If this person can manage to charge you less money and trouble than setting this up on your own, he (or she) has a new business opportunity.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's much better to:
- Buy an extra cell phone
- Hook it to the computer
- Pay for two cell services (they have to operate simultaneously)
- Install and configure IPDrum and Skype
- Dial twice on each call
Plus, you get the benefit that there's 3 or 4 extra single points of failure, and you get to use twice the air bandwith when your calling from the same tower as the dedicated cell-phone.And I'm sure there's no degradation in quality!
It's not too far fetched, although I'd agree that "Dwarfs" is a little extreme.
What's the Windows desktop market share? 95%?
The vast majority of Windows and Mac systems have Flash player installed. I'd wager on 95% or more. And probably more than half of Linux and other OSS workstation boxes have Flash too.
Now if you add in non-PC's, it's probably wrong. Java runs (albeit probably too slowly for voice) on a LOT of phones... and PDA's? Does Flash run on PocketPC yet?
I was doing this with Sprint for a while. I hooked my N400 cell phone to my laptop with a cord I got on Ebay and some downloaded software. it made a dialup speed connection that worked anywhere Sprint has service. At the time I worked for a City that didn't allow desktop internet access... so my laptop/cell phone combo was my only link to /. and Dilbert.....
Need professional pictures taken in the Puget Sound? Hire me!
yep, thats way too much trouble to make free phone calls! Only advantage this gives you is that you can be mobile, which is the main reason I've been avoiding Skype. This will give you mobility, but then again, how good of a quality will you get out of VOIP over a cell phone? Cell phones are always cracking up and Skype is only marginally good. Add these together and I'm not sure how good it will sound.
I've been using Packet8 for $20 a month for unlimited US and Canda for more than a year now. The service is great and they also have plan for calling Europe or Asia unlimited for $49. If you have relatives in those countries packet8 seems to be a better solution (www.packet8.net). If you are calling some one a lot in another country, you can get a second Packet8 phone for about $15, and send it over there. Get a highspeed connection and you can call all you want between those phone. Much less hazzle and no configuration problems!
IPOfC (IP over free-cellular)
The telecom's worst nightmare. Being your own forwarder into the net from free wireless from anyplace? (Not to mention security concerns)
But, they would quickly move to ensure that your line only carried a good enough fidelity for voice, or start charging you bandwidth costs. Either way, you can bet the telcos won't give it away.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I suspect the opposite will happen, and they'll stop counting minutes altogether. Where I live, the cell cartel ($120 for 90 min/mo avg.) fell apart once the POTS phone company started offering unlimited wireless minutes for $50/mo (not including long distance, but I'm on an island so any long distance is international by definition). Once they crossed the line, the rest of the companies followed suit.
I can't prove, but highly suspect, that per-minute calling is nothing more than milking the customer. I suspect that the reason there are free nights/weekends isn't because it's cheaper for the phone companies, but because the (cell)phone companies are extorting the fact that businesses and many people must be available during business hours, and have no choice but to pay per-minute fees. If unlimited-minute companies can get a foothold, or if even one major provider starts offering unlimited minutes, game on.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I'll do you one better. I have a $12 asterisk card. I have a landline that allows me to make unlimited calls in the Richmond, VA area. I have broadband.
I don't care if my landline is tied up most of the time, I have a cellphone finally (just got my first a few months back). Maybe you're in a similar situation. Maybe you'd buy a $12 asterisk card too.
If we set up the hardware correctly, well then, I can make long distance calls to your area, and you to mine, and it won't cost us anything. Better yet, technically, your grandma down the road, who doesn't even have a computer, could make a LD call to Richmond VA, without it showing up on her bill. She dials into your asterisk machine, it puts it through over broadband to mine. My grandma could do the same thing... or for that matter, anyone in Richmond could do the same thing.
Why would I do this, you ask? Because even if I only cheat the bastard phone companies out of a nickel of long distance revenue, I consider it a victory.
Anyone feel like helping?
Usage patterns have changed over the years and the costs of switches and trunks have declined considerably. For a cellular system, the major cost is going to be the construction and maintenance of cell sites. Since the number of cell sites is driven by peak usage, we are back in the situation where those who use the system during peak usage periods are going to pay the highest rate. Nights and weekends can be cheap or free because of the unused capacity of the system during off-peak hours.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
We used to do this in the old school modem days with 3 way calling... you have no LD... Call a friend who did and wanted brownie points.. 3way modem to the latest hot download BBS... Or maybe it was the call forwarding... Anyways, been done before, its just a new implementation to use it with the Cell phone & then over IP..
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
I haven't been impressed. I don't know if it's the codec, or something else about Skype, but the quality is underwhelming.
I live in Asia, and have non-mind-blowing DSL (1024/384, with 300ms ping to the USA). I use VoIP providers via Asterisk on a colo box in the USA to place and receive calls via a Sipura SPA-1001. Most people I talk with in Europe or the USA can't tell that I'm using VoIP or on the other side of the planet.
However, whenever I use Skype (from here or elsewhere) there's this sort of cycling effect, about 1Hz, where the quality of the sound changes from "wide" to "narrow" and the volume pulses as well. Dropouts are frequent. This is over the exact same connections that work fine with the Sipura box (and the people I've Skyped with are very well connected).
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Unless it is a datacall. If it is a datacall, then you wouldn't need anything other than iLBC, but I don't think it is a datacall, because you are listening on the other end. When you listen on the other end, your network provider's vocoder must encode voice from you and decode voice to you.
Granted, you will lose some bits here and there, but these things are definetly in serial, not in parallel.
Dude. It sure doesn't help the qound quality when you're talking out of your ass.
Cascading is when you serially link lossy compression - since codecs use different psycho-acoustical models (else they'd be the same codec) they'll drop different aspects of the signal; you'll end up with only the sounds where both codecs overlappingly decide those frequencies are important, and both codecs will introduce their own artifacts.
The joyful bit is where artifacts that are particularly noticeable are most likely to be amplified by the second codec, since it's likely to figure noticeable sounds are psychoacoustically significant (which they are).