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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?"
I'm guessing Cringely has made a prediction
With a free mobile-to-mobile feature, you don't have to be able to make free calls, but cheap calls would be cool too. You could interface directly to your computer for a whole range of other things too. My take is that the cool part is in the interface to the computer, with free calls being one of the multiple possibilities. Once this gets popular, there may be some limitations though.
I wonder if this method is patented... ?
see a Text Widget
Talk about a hack...
Makes me wonder how much delay there is between talking and the other party listening with the cell to cell to skype to skype to cell to cell.
We have a new acronym c2c2p2p2c2c
There are already companies that offer this. For example, metroPCS which offers unlimited calls. No minute counting.
For $40 a month, you get unlimited local and long distance calls.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
While it's a step in the right direction, if you want to call somebody on a landline, you still have to pay for the SkypeOut, yes?
It seems like a lot of trouble for little savings. I guess my perspective would be different if I was a very mobile person who needed to make frequent out-of-country calls (more common in Europe, yes, I know).
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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."
I didn't know that Captain Crunch whistles work on cell phones.
http://www.skype.com/products/skype/linux/
By running from Skype to a mobile phone, you use two fairly crappy codecs: iLBC at 13 kilobits per second on top of GSM at 12 kilobits per second. On their own, each one is marginally tolerable, but I would rather gouge my eardrums out with a dagger than listen to the two codecs combined.
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.
... have to pay $60/month minimum for two-phone wireless service and 2c a minute to termine the call at a real phone.
You've met "free-as-in-speech" and "free-as-in-beer" -- now meet "free-as-in-really-expensive"! Yayyyy capitalism!!
Yes, is http://xcelis.com/
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.
Here's the link5 3&tid=215
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/03/19492
The plan requires two active cellular phone connections. Last I checked that isn't free. Sure, it will be cheaper than actually making direct calls, but that is not the same as free. Furthermore, it doesn't sound like it handles incoming calls, so really what you have is a flat fee for unlimited outgoing calls. This doesn't sound particularly free.
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
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're using Firefox I guess? If firefox doesn't recognise a url entered as a url it does an "I'm Feeling Lucky" google search on the "url" entered. The link is broken and is starts with "http" and the first result on searching for http (and thus the I'm Feeling Lucky link) on Google is Microsoft.com.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
"Just how long till someone does this on a large scale, by overselling the dedicated lines, and starts selling true unlimited cell plans?"
Just longer than it takes for some shady lawmakers to sneak in a law to prevent that.
Blender And Linux Fan
Hey, cool, it's an English to Klingon translator!
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."
Technology seems to be increasing the economic efficiency of the marketplace by supporting a type of business model arbitrage. If somebody offers something for less than it really costs or is really worth, people use technology to quickly find a way to exploit it.
For example, cell companies offer free in-system minutes to encourage friends & family to recruit new customers -- a nice little viral marketing ploy and something that, I'm sure, reduces stress in friends & family cell phone conversations. But it also creates an opportunity because those free in-system minutes are worth something if they can be somehow converted to out-of-system calls. Hence the motivations for this little hack.
Or consider the case of the single-use video camera. The unit is offered at a subsidized price (less than the true price of the camera) with the expectation that the consumer will return the camera and pay for the DVD conversion service. With a bit of hacking, though, a person can get a low-grade digital video camera for only single-use price of about $20.
Technology allows people to exploit these situations (and publish the results), much to the chagrin of the businesses that use these models. I wonder if this will drive businesses to a true pay-for-what-you-get mode of operation. No cell minutes will be free because it will be too easy to abuse free minutes. No single-use device will be as cheap -- it will require a deposit for the value of the asset.
That technology allows people to use products and services in unintended ways will force companies to change their products or business models to either lock-out unintended uses or build in a charge for the cost of those uses.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Another way to get free cell calls
*ducks*
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?
Working for an upcoming VoIP company, I can see where things are headed. Vonage is already connecting customers with WiFi phones. This means you have phone service, and you can use this phone anywhere there is a WiFi connection -- your office, Starbucks, or whatever.
Since this upcoming VoIP company is an offshoot of a Wireless ISP, we also get to hear all the talk about WiMAX. Intel and Nokia are teaming up to implement it on a massive scale. Assuming that the frequency licensing does not become an issue, consumers will be able to purchase true nomadic high-speed connections (with speeds probably in the vicinity of today's mid-range DSL) for roughly the same price we pay today for our broadband.
The obvious combination of these ideas is a phone that connects to a VoIP network over a nomadic WiMAX connection. $200 hardware, $50 for your internet connection, and another $25 a month for the phone service that you can take anywhere. As I posted above, at least one VoIP provider is offering unlimited international calling. Even if the rates for VoIP increase considerably, this is still well below the threshold for cost benefit.
Mods: Do you disagree with me? Go ahead and mod me down. Meta-mods will sort it out. Good luck!
Flash has been on PDA's and PocketPC's for a few years now...
s /pda.html
http://www.macromedia.com/mobile/supported_device
Bah, I've been doing this for years. Two applications:
1. Calling my Asterix box and having it forward to regular numbers
2. Calling my Dial-Up Server and surfing the internet
Although the DUN Server is a little slow (9600 baud), it still serves it purpose of retrieving email. I used to have unlimited text messaging on my cell plan, I could just send commands (ie shutdown -r now) to my servers, but that option got removed.
It's a better plan over here in the UK, where we don't have to pay to receive calls. (why you lot put up with paying for incoming calls, I don't understand....)
RTFA. It apparently works for incoming calls too. Presumably their software automatically dials your preprogrammed cell number when an incoming call comes in via Skype.
I could be wrong about that formula.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Plus, the camera remains single use -- how many solder/desolder cycles is that chip gonna survive?
Depends. The chip is electrically identical to a SmartMedia card, so (provided you can successfully desolder the chip) why not just solder on a SmartMedia socket?
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...
It's really great to read about what Cringely has to say. But I think I also need to know what Dvorak thinks about this.
English is easier said than done.
Because when you add everything up, it's cheaper that way.
Remember, you don't only receive calls, you make them too (even if you personally only receive calls, there would be no calls to receive if people in general weren't making them).
Studies have shown again and again in that receiver-pays markets (e.g., USA, Singapore, China), the total amount paid by consumers per unit of mobile phone airtime is lower.
This is because the person who is paying for the call is the same person who has market power in the relationship with the service provider. In the caller-pays system, the person who is paying for the call has no way to express their dissatisfaction with the rate by switching to a different provider, so it is not a competitive factor. The people who pay have to put up with whatever rates are in effect, or not make the call at all.
Caller-pays is a huge swindle, built on a transparent lie, and it's costing European consumers billions.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS