VOIP Cell Phones Coming Soon

prostoalex writes "Associated Press reports on the latest cell phones with WiFi support demoed at this year's CTIA Wireless 2006 conference. New models fall back to WiFi hotspot when the user is at home, at work, or cellular signal gets too weak. Biggest surprise? The cell phone conversation is not dropped when the switch between cellular network and WiFi hotspot takes place."

Comments

Re:Shouldn't it be reverse?

[HazE_nMe]

From TFA:

UMA works by tunneling cellular information packets through the Internet when Wi-Fi is available and reverting to cellular towers when it is not.

From what the article said, it does prefer wifi over cell towers.

Here in Japan

[mxpengin]

Big news, Japan has had cell phones with VoIP support since 2004. nice technology .

Here's the technical story behind all of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to http://www.umatechnology.org/

UMA is the technology that supports WiFi cellular voice. A processing unit (known as a UNC) must be added to the cellular operator's network. The UNC bridges the WiFi-carried voice into the cellular network.

It already prefers wifi over cellular

[Tusaki]

"fall back to WiFi hotspot when the user is at home, at work". I agree that the wording could be better, but they meant to say that these new cell phones hold a list of trusted wifi networks which it will prefer over a cellular connection, such as a home or work wifi network.

How do I know, besides reading the article? I develop for cutting edge cell phones and PDA's for a living.

Re:British Telecom already sells wireless VOIP cel

[jacksonj04]

The only issue is you get an 07 (Mobile) number, so even when you're at 'home' and over the VoIP people calling in still get charged their provider's rates for connecting to mobiles. It's only outgoing calls which benefit from the low cost VoIP.

Re:Just what we need...

[bhima]

I don't get what you're whining about... It's fair that people pay for excessive transfer volumes. The ISP connection packages in the US have always baffled me... there are so few choices.

Here in Austria we may have fewer ISPs but the number of available packages dwarfs what is available in the US... For example my mum has a package with medium bandwidth but very low transfer volume, this gives her a nice experience on the internet (and the computer updates actually get done) for the nearly the same price as dial up. I have a high bandwidth with a "Fair Use" transfer volume that is un-metered during off hours, and my little brother has the high bandwidth unlimited transfer volume package for his attempt to collect all the porn in the known universe.

It's not the paying for transfer volume that's bad... it's the unethical business practices of American businesses that's bad.

VOIP capable handsets are already common

[TheRealDamion]

I have two voip capable cellphones, a 9500 and 9300i. There are also the PalmOS wifi enabled phones too most of which can get free VOIP software and make free calls from any free wireless lan.

http://www.europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,6771,77854,00. html -phone
http://www.my-xda.com/comp.html -more phones.
http://www.barablu.com/ -voip software.
http://www.skype.com/download/skype/mobile/ -more voip software

Re:Phone number

[squiggleslash]

The carriers love this. It's a system called UMA, GSM routed via TCP/IP. The calls still get routed over their network, they just reach the network via the Internet rather than their radio frequency allocations. It's essentially more bandwidth, the customers pay for the bulk of it, and the customer is essentially fixing blackspots and making their own coverage a little more reliable without the carrier having to do anything.

Despite the use of the term VoIP in the headline, this has nothing to do with Vonage or Skype.