VoIP Going Wireless

imashoe writes "CNet's News.com reports on the wireless future of VoIP. Similarly BonaFideReviews.com has published an interesting article that attempts to predict what the future of voice communications will be like. The two editorals seem to agree that VoIP is going mobile and in a big way."

Comments

Can You PH33R M3 Now?

[Orrin Bloquy]

Hopefully encryption will make this a little more secure than regular cell communications.

Re:Can You PH33R M3 Now?

[SoloFlyer2]

Hopefully people will stop pushing the propriatry nonsense that is Skype and look toward the future and the open protocol SIP...

and btw the SIP already permits crypto negotiation.

Re:Can You PH33R M3 Now?

[Hercynium]

Bah, I'll bite; I'm bored.

When you talk 'secure' do you mean secure from someone with a radio scanner? CDMA, GSM, and all their 'descendents' have that already.

And don't tell me that the encryption can be broken. It takes highly complex, expensive equipment to do that.

Anyhow... I would imagine the police can simply get a warrant and tap the call at the carrier's switch. Sure, SIP could be used to support end-to-end encryption, but cell phones are roughly as secure as a land line. I dare say cellular may be *more* secure! Here's my rationale: Cellular interception (from phone to tower) requires, say a $50K scanner, complex radio equipment and software. Land-line interception takes a pocket knife, a spare phone and a couple of alligator clips.

mmmm, FUD.

Don't use WiFi

[CypherXero]

*ring*......*ring*...Hello?

"Hey, I have to tell you something importan....."*click*...Hey! Quit downloading pr0n, I'm trying to use the phone!

Slashdot poster rule #1

[Brandon K]

One or more of the following must apply for a post to be accepted:

a. Does the post concern Google?
b. Does the post concern VOIP?
c. Does the post concern Microsoft in a negative manner?
d. Does the post concern Apple and/or Linux in a positive manner?
e. Does the post concern any randomly picked open source product?
e2. Bonus points if nobody has ever heard of it before.
f. Does the post rate Firefox as the best internet browser?
g. Does the post blatantly state or strongly suggest that the modern world is stripping away our rights?
h. Does the post discuss a minor nuisance that IT geeks may or may not have personally experienced?
i. Is the post asking a question that can only truly be answered by a lawyer, or other professional, who would likely not be found on Slashdot?

Test It...

[fiji]

If you want, you can run a free VoIP quality test at http://testyourvoip.com/. So if you have wireless, or want to place a VoIP call over your Cell data link (for whatever perverse reason) you can check your quality before setting it all up if you have a web browser with Java enabled.

-ben

oh no!

[yagu]

Okay, here's the thing that bothers me about VOIP going wireless: I already find cellular (wireless) unacceptable in quality. I already find VOIP unacceptable in quality (though I will concede under perfect conditions, it can be quite good). I may not be able to pick out different brands of beer on a bet (actually, I can), but I can smell a cellular call 12,000 miles away. And I can tell a VOIP call 5 "route" hops away.

I assume this development implies some marriage of the technologies (I wasn't able definitively to tell from the article). I can only shudder at the thought. Can you hear me w8erfjkldfa?...., Caeoa yow hear ewlrkj now? FSCK!

Maybe the most irritating thing in this is the stampede to not offer great technology for what I'll call "comfortable" conversation/communication, but instead: Get there first; Maximize throughput; and Make lots of money. The technology on the other hand is quite capable of delivering the high quality land line users are accustomed to... but, you're never going to see (hear) it in the competitive sleezy crappy quality and service world of wireless.

When was the last time you had to constantly repeat yourself on land line to land line phone conversations (not attribtutable to non-understandable help desk support)? Yeah, technology marches on, I just wish it would spiff up its uniform.

Re:oh no!

[periol]

actually, this doesn't involve the marriage of technology. it involves getting VOIP and Skype-type services to work over wireless connections. actually, this technology has been around for a while, but it's been very expensive. if the cost comes down and the quality increases, you'll see companies start to move to wireless VOIP implementations. there is also software VOIP that could try to make good connections over public wifi networks.

cell phones aren't involved in this, except that in some areas this could be a threat to their market (if, say you live and work in downtown Long Beach, CA, where there's a free muni wifi network).

Re:oh no!

[andreyw]

You actually likely talking about the same thing, although you're not aware of it. Spring uses SIP. Nextel uses iDen which also rides over TCP/IP.

Mobile VOIP is not news. It's not even old news. More like 10 year-old news.

Already wireless!

[Anonymous Squonk]

Got a Bluetooth headset hooked up to my iMac running Skype. I can call from anywhere in the world...as long as I'm about 20 feet away from my computer...

Wireless VoIP

[Khyber]

Knowing how weather is prone to interfere with cellular communications right now, how are they going to make wireless VoIP proof against mother nature?

And I can really imagine how much it's going to suck if lightning takes out a tower.

Really, we don't even have widespread wifi access across the country. What's the point of doing this now when the infrastructure doesn't fully exist in all areas?

Quality

[evildogeye]

I notice a quality difference between VoIP when I am directly plugged into my router and when I am using WIFI. And VoIP sound quality is already subpar to begin with. Eventually, wireless VoIP will be king. As it stands now, however, wired VoIP still needs some significant quality upgrades.

Hmm

[andreyw]

I am no luddite, but this a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Using existing *public* Internet carriers for low-latency and naturally real-time voice streams is asking for a trainwreck.

As an end user wishing to say, tie together two offices of my company with VOIP, there is a lot that is not under my control. Although I can use QoS/various traffic shaping facilties to ensure minimum latency and maximum bandwith for VOIP on *my* side of things, I have completely no control over what happens to the data when goes out of my DSL modem into the DSLAM and on forward (or T1 line, whatever).

QoS: A lot of ISPs dump all IP QoS flags, silently, because well... heh... they can provide that for mucho dinero. Even if they don't, who is to guarantee that my voice won't get congested someplace clogged by someone's pr0n torrents? No one.

Mobile VOIP is not new folks. Your Sprint phone uses SIP over IP. Your iDen phone uses TCP/IP to communicate to the servers. The mobile carriers, however, have their own private networks that are not part of the ``Intarweb''. The mobile carriers can control traffic on their network. The mobile carriers can ensure service. Combining mobile phone technology with VOIP over the public Internet is going to combine the worst of both worlds - get cut off because network congestion someplace upstream or lose the signal. I'll pass.

Btw, of course I didn't RTFA.

Re:Hmm

[saridder]

Everything you mentioned sounds fine on paper, but in reality congestion in the cloud rarely happens. If that was the case, Skype, Vonage, Google Talk, and 100's of other VoIP services that travel over the internet wouldn't work, yet they do, right?

There's a bandwidth surplus in the cloud due to overinvestment and most problem happen where you described them, on the last mile/in your equipment. Plus with de-jitter buffers and other mechanisms most VoIP end devices use, losing a few packets once in a while isn't a big deal.

VOIP callcenters

[GaelTadh]

VOIP is really kicking ass in the callcenter world and wireless voip will undoubtably follow suit. Hopefully this doesn't mean that the dell service rep answering your call is in starbucks :)

SIP is the path

[Broken_Ladder]

The only VoIP "solution" than really matters in the long run is SIP. It will eventually win out because it's an open standard, and already supported by the popular Gizmo Project (http://gizmoproject.com./ I'm currently using an analog telephone to SIP adapter, and calls to other SIP users directly over the net are clearer than PSTN-to-PSTN calls by a great margin. To handle dialing sip addresses like brokenladder@iptel.org, you just register with a free ENUM number at enum2go.com (uses the standard e164.arpa) or get one at e164.org for instance. Then you can go to brokenladder.com and look at the contact page to call me and test out your equipment ;)

Article misses the most important point

[Timbotronic]

Wireless VoIP has been around for a while already. There are plenty of people running Skype on PDA's with WiFi and GSM/GPRS for example. What we *don't* have today is handoff between networks mid call. ie. If I start a call over VoIP and WiFi, it should seemlessly switch to the cellular network when I go out of range from the hotspot. Even better, the call should go peer-peer if I'm within range of the person I'm calling. It'd also be nice to know how far away they are and in which direction, but I digress.

Although the tech for seemless network handoff is tricky, I think the main issue to adoption is resistance from the cellular networks who stand to lose a fortune.

Latency!

[Tmack]

Whats your avg. latency on a normal pots phone? Barely noticable. Same on VoIP (unless you are attempting it over dialup to a far away country). Avg satelite latency? Very noticable, ever watch the news when they have a correspondant "Live via Satelite"? The local anchor asks a question and then you sit through a few seconds of silence while the question goes across satelite to the correspondant, and a few more while the answer comes back. Satelite phones have the same issues, though maybe not as severe. Satelite broadband has the issue as well, though the uploads go through your dialup connection (in most setups). Not to mention the cost associated with taking up time on a sat link...

tm