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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."
A good reason not to do this is availibility cell tower slots and resulting customer service issue of dropped calls. Cingular is advertising their great low drop call percentage... what they don't tell you is the number of calls that are not able to be completed. I live in a college town and at busy hours of the day I cannot make a phone call for one to two hour stretches. The thing to consider is that cell towers have a greater service area, so when you leave the WiFi hotspot and try to use the nice big cell tower, you call gets dropped because the tower can not handle your call. This makes people angry that their call got dropped by their provider and may make them want to switch. The whole idea is that falling back onto the WiFi hotspot will give the uptime for calls. Generally the only time cell coverage will drop is when you go inside builds, which is also the place where you have the greatest chance of picking up a WiFi signal. I can't wait for my WiMax phone :-)
Quit yelling.
"The cell phone conversation is not dropped when the switch between cellular network and WiFi hotspot takes place."
Speaking as ex tech-support for an VOIP service that will remain anonymous, allow me to say that half the time American VOIP service over anything except fiber-optic can't manage to maintain a phone call period. =p
I'm not sure I believe the Japanese firms are really doing it any better, but they do have a better infrastructure set up, so maybe it does work halfway decently.
It might help if the half of America that jumped on VOIP because it was cheap would at least update the rest of their technology along with it. No matter how good the connection your ISP is giving you is, if you're still using a modem and router that would manage higher data transmission rates if converted to carrier pigeon roosts, your overall experience will be lousy.
And wiring. Ma Bell laid copper wire may be good enough for the telecomms to still wring a profit out of, but it's probably not helping your connection any. Nor are the cords that have been hidden behind your desk getting chewed by cats for the last ten years.
Also, interference from large stacks of electronics piled on your desk, certain brands of laptop and ginormous desktop monitors, halogen lights, and having metals like a fridge, or say, wall full of plumbing between your wireless router and where-ever you're trying to use equipment.
Allright, I'm going to shut up now. Suffice to say, I could go on for two more pages at least.
It's a good technology with 'a lot of potential', but as for something for widespread daily use? That marriage of consumer and product will be about as good as the one to the girl with the 'nice personality'. If they were lying about the personality. =p
And then there's cell phones. Never did the tech support for those, but I saw it.
"Your cell phone isn't working? Hmmm, let me check a few things."
*Anonymous network down across the entire southwest*
"Well, it might be a network problem, we'll get you back up as soon as possible. What? No, only a few people affected I'm sure."
Ah, the lies, the horrible, horrible lies.....
*cough* Sorry, my therapist said I was over it....
*He lied too!!!!*
Looks like some people need VOIP badly.
A guy in Malaysia got hit with a 281 trillion dollar bill:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12247590/
And believe it or not, the phone company hasn't fessed up to an error as of yet and is threatening full criminal charges for non-payment.
What's the interest on a 281 trillion dollar loan anyway? I think only the US Treasury could tabulate it.