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Phones And Skype Get Together
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC has a look at some of the interesting gadgets that will be available for purchase now that Skype has published instructions on how to build the service into phones." From the article: "We saw one other innovative product at CES that is definitely worth a Skype addict's consideration. The Skype Wi-Fi phone, coming this March from Netgear, is basically a Skype cell phone. It connects to any wireless network, letting users make Skype calls completely unconnected to a PC or phone line. If it works as well as it appeared to when Netgear CEO Patrick Lo demonstrated it during a press conference by calling Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom, the little service from Luxembourg will have officially escaped from the confines of the personal computer."
Yes, calling landlines will always be chargeable (though with Skype et al it's all local rates). The point I was exploring was that when we ALL have wifi phones there'll be no need to charge at all! One has to wonder whether the phone companies will "allow" that when the technology becomes ubiquitous.
Argh.
Someone just needs to write an open-source SIP/IAX Skype gateway so I can use my SIP phone (now available super-cheap) w/Skype. I see there is one out there, but it's windows only, thirty bucks, and closed source.
Asterisk support for Skype, now there would be something!
There's no WPA support according to the FAQ. Also, how does it handle captive portals? Maybe it has a built in web browser, but I can't find any mention of it.
Maybe we need to convince more hotspot providers to allow free skype calls!
Anyway, wifi is still pretty rare around me, unless you want to 'borrow' home users connections, and thats getting quite dicey now.
Darren.
http://www.22balmoralroad.net/ http://www.tinynetworks.co.uk/
This is because Skype already has its own encryption layer. An attacker might be able to do something annoying once they crack the WEP encryption (such as interjecting packets), but they won't be able to listen in to your conversation without then breaking the Skype packet encryption (which is probably stronger than WEP).
However, I do share a general annoyance with devices that don't support WPA/WPA2. My wireless network is completely WPA2 based, and I have one device which does, at best, WEP. My current solution has been to disallow this device (a Palm Tungsten C) from connecting to my network by continuing to run WPA2, which is an annoyance (as it means I can't use its WiFi functionality in my home). Device manufacturers need to wake up to the fact that WPA and WPA2 are a reality, and that their devices need to support these modern standards alongside WEP.
Yaz.
I puchased an HP ipaq 6315 a year ago which was one of the first mobile phones to have classic cell phone service, GPRS internet, WiFi and bluetooth all in the same device. Here's what I've observed and learned, the first of which relates directly to Wi-Fi phone calling:
1) I tried making WiFi calls with Skype running on the MS PocketPC OS 2002. I *was* able to make a Skype call over WiFi... but I couldn't really hear much more than a word or two from the other person and lots of garble. Basically it was disappointingly unusable. I am not sure whether the slow 3-400MHz CPU is the problem or the nature of the non-optimizal internet connection and signalling overhead (I suspect the former). But I tried repeatedly, and I tried to move to be closer to the WiFi source with no positive effect. So this may not work great on mobile phones today. YMMV and "tomorrow" is a different story of course.
2) The cell phone seems to end up in wierd states that need rebooting. This happened once every few months with my Palm-based Treo, but has annoyingly, and ironically according to Microsoft stereotype, definitely been a once a week-type issue with my PocketPC phone. *Most* annoying is when it happens when you're on a call and you get a second inbound call and then system then gives you an unending series of dialog boxes in confusion. (By rebooting I really mean a "soft reset" where you need to push a thin object into a hole.) To be fair to Microsoft, it may be true that some fraction of those hangs might be due to bugs in the apps that lead to a platform-level hang. *But*, I can't cut MS too much slack because the MS platform doesn't give me a way to kill/restart the app it seems. (Note: I haven't had time to spend the hours necessary to research and get to the bottom of this.)
3) The cell-phone seems to lie about signal strength at times; it might show full signal but then right after I dial, it shrinks to two bars. I thought it might be a limitation of how polling/powersaving works, but in any case, I've found that I can't necessarily trust the "bar" ratings, even when I'm stationary, to describe signal strength until I actually make a call. I have zero idea whether this is caused by my phone, or just random emi interference, or the carrier or whether others have this same issue.
4) My favorite feature on both my Treo Palm and the PocketPC phone has been the ability to sync contacts on my phone with contacts on my PC (in MS Outlook, which I use for contacts but not for email.)
5) My second favorite feature has been the free downloadable musician tools available on the platform. (The selection was stronger on the Palm-based Treo.) I.e. metronome, tuner, and guitar chord charts. It's just very cool, since I always have my cell phone with me, that I also thus always have guitar chord charts in a pinch.
YMMV but here are the lessons I shelled out too much bucks to learn so I pass them along to my fellow Slashdotters.
Cheers,
--LP
It will probably be quite similar to email taking customers away from the post office.
I don't think postal service is a good comparison, both because there are things the postal service can do that e-mail cannot, and because e-mail *has* taken a lot of customers away from the post office.
The postal service has two important abilities that e-mail does not. First, it can deliver physical objects. Second, it provides reliability and traceability for important communications, particularly when registered mail is used.
Where those things don't matter, though, e-mail has largely replaced snail mail. There's a segment of the population that doesn't have or use e-mail, but it's shrinking (and aging) and will eventually disappear. Even among low-income people, e-mail use is the norm among the younger population.
In the case of phone service, traditional phones do not have any similar advantages over VOIP. Sure, VOIP has some technical limitations at present -- many Internet connections aren't good enough to make it work well, and the 911 issue isn't fully resolved -- but those are technical problems with technical solutions. Largely, though, VOIP is a fully-functional, drop-in replacement for landline service (and, with enough WiFi hotspots, for cell service) that is more featureful and cheaper.
So, no, I don't the growth and usage of VOIP will in any way parallel the history of e-mail.
There is one element of e-mail's history that may affect VOIP, though: spam. The telephonic equivalent of spam, telemarketing, is pretty well managed at the moment. It's mildly annoying, but thanks to the fact that the telecommunications industry is centralized in a few companies, it can be regulated and managed with things like the "Do Not Call" lists and other rules about who telemarketers can call, and when. The most important factor that keeps telemarketing from being too much of annoyance, though, is cost. In particular it's far too expensive to conduct it from other countries in order to sidestep the regulations.
Both of those elements disappear with pure VOIP calls. Not only would VOIP spam be dirt cheap (especially with recorded calls -- no need to pay a person to talk to the targets), but it would be cost-effective to do it from nations where regulatory force cannot be applied.
However, VOIP is young enough that we have a chance to implement anti-spam technology into the foundations of the technology. We understand the dynamics of spam pretty well from the e-mail world, and people are already talking about what we should do to prevent SIP spam. If SIP spam can be avoided or minimized, then I think VOIP can be a perfect replacement for traditional phone service, unlike e-mail, which can never quite replace postal service.
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