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

Shouldn't it be reverse?

[JoeLinux]

Maybe it's just me, but I would think that the preference would be for wifi first, THEN cellular. You'd burn less minutes that way.

But, heck, what do I know? I still think that that coyote is gonna get that RoadRunner some day.

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.

Re:Shouldn't it be reverse?

[T-Bone_142]

but then the carrier would have to over charge you even more to make up for the money your saving.

Re:Shouldn't it be reverse?

[johndapunk]

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 :-)

Re:Shouldn't it be reverse?

[giorgiofr]

You clearly haven't been living in a capitalist country for long if you think that companies give a damn about what the consumer wants.

Whereas in a communist country they certainly do.

Re:Shouldn't it be reverse?

[squiggleslash]

I think you misunderstand the technology, which isn't surprising given the article summary.

First, yes, the preference is for calls to be routed via Wifi.

However, no, you don't burn less minutes. The technology under discussion is called UMA. It's a way of tunnelling GSM over 802.11 or Bluetooth (or presumably other future home wireless standards.) The phone call still has to be routed to your carrier (only, over the Internet rather than via the carrier's towers) otherwise your call would get dropped the moment you get out of range of your wireless network.

This is not the same thing as those mobile phones that also support Skype (for example) over 802.11. It's essentially a way for GSM subscribers to make their own home have less coverage blackspots (and help the carrier gain a little more capacity.) Your call costs may go down (or rather, the amount of minutes you get for your dollar may increase), because by doing this you're increasing capacity for the network, but it's possible a carrier will give you "free airtime" when you're in range of your wireless network, generally that's not the way they operate.

There is one major downside BTW, which is that in order to use an access point, it has to be registered with the carrier, and generally you need to manually tell the phone about it (once, obviously, not every time you get in range.) So don't think people are just going to set up ad-hoc wireless networks in well known blackspots just to help Cingular and T-Mobile customers out.

Re:Shouldn't it be reverse?

[pNutz]

But you're paying cell rates to tunnel through Wifi, when you could be using a VoIP carrier over wifi. That's $19.95/month for unlimited minutes vs. $100/month or so from a cell provider.

The GP seemed to think that minutes from the cell provider would be cheap or free over Wifi. This is unlikely and not indicated in the article.

Of course, you would have to buy your own phone for Wifi VoIP. At the moment they're like cell phones from 1995 and cost $200-500.

Re:Shouldn't it be reverse?

[LS]

To all the igornant moderators that marked this bit of uninformed sarcasm as insightful, I can tell you as someone who HAS moved to China, and has lived in Beijing for one year, that everything is actually quite customer oriented and personal here. You never have to talk to a machine on the phone, the person behind the counter ignores everyone else until finished dealing with you, everything is anonymous (gas, electric, phone, etc through smart cards), you can negotiate prices, and storefronts are generally realistic embodiments of customer needs, i.e. a simple counters with products, instead of disneylands designed by corporate offices. You usually don't have to deal with an anonymous beaurocracy that treats you like a number when you need service. At the retail level everything is pretty much unregulated, so the system is quite efficient. It's quite amazing and strange that things in the supposedly free-market USA are quite the opposite.

Phone number

[Zouden]

Having your cell phone connected through VoIP while at home is all well and good, but what about your phone number? When someone calls your cell number, it's going to have to get switched over to the internet (rather than the cellular network) to get through to your phone. That's going to require help from the carriers, and they probably aren't too happy about this.

Re:Phone number

[Elminst]

Most likely, the phones would be polled every few minutes to see what they're attached to.
In much the same way that the cell towers check to see if your phone is still within range when you're not using it. This is the reason your phone sets off your speakers or makes your monitor twitch randomly

So the system sends out a signal to find the phone based on its last known location. Or the phone checks in with the system every few minutes to give an update on how to reach it.

Doesn't sound like much of a stretch from the current method of locating a cell phone.

Re:Phone number

[Elminst]

And I just realized that my comment doesn't really address your real concern; that the internet carriers are going to want a piece of the pie for carrying data for the cell phone carriers.
The upside is that many of them are owned by the same people, eg. Cingular is owned by ATT & BellSouth. Verizon is, well, Verizon.

Although it's mentioned in the article that "internet minutes" may be cheaper that "cell tower" minutes because wifi radio spectrum and the internet are cheaper than running cell towers.

But the problem comes when you're not at home. Pop down to the coffee shop and start talking on your cell phone using the wifi hotspot. You pay the cell company less... but who pays the internet bill for your cell traffic?

Sounds like a new level of peering agreement wars... Yay.

Re:Phone number

[Belial6]

How about the same person that would pay for the rest of your TCP/IP traffic.

Re:Phone number

[FireFury03]

Most likely, the phones would be polled every few minutes to see what they're attached to.
In much the same way that the cell towers check to see if your phone is still within range when you're not using it. This is the reason your phone sets off your speakers or makes your monitor twitch randomly

Actually, GSM phones don't get polled very frequently at all (usually every few hours ISTR). But the phone listens to the base station and if it goes out of range of one and into range of the other it will transmit to inform the network that it's moved. If the phone outright goes out of range then the first the network usually knows about it is when it tries to contact the phone (e.g. to place a call or send an SMS) and doesn't get a response. Which is why there is sometimes a few seconds of silence after dialling an out-of-coverage cellphone before it drops you through to voicemail - it's trying to contact the phone in it's last known cell and when that times out you get forwarded to voicemail.

Polling the phone regularly has the disadvantage that the phone has to transmit acks regularly too and transmitting eats the batteries. Far better for the phone to just listen and only transmit to tell the network that it's moved.

I imagine that the way this system will work is to record both a "last known" cell and a "last known" IP address. The last known IP will be tried first and if it fails then the last known cell will be tried.

I'm not sure how they will bill for the seamless handoff stuff though - maybe the whole thing will be charged at cellular rates, in which case there doesn't seem to be a lot of advantage to the end user.

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.

Just what we need...

[ImaNihilist]

Something to piss off the big phone companies even more. Once Qwest gets bought out there will only be two left: Verizon and AT&T. Add in the two big broadband providers, Comcast and AOL TimeWarner and you've got a grand total of four companies that will control everything. You better believe that if most voice communications go VoIP/broadband that they are going to have their annual meeting behind closed doors a little early to discuss how everyone needs to start charging a per GB monthly fee for data. Sure, they'll do it under the guise of "extra" speed and lower prices. "Get Comcast Highspeed for just $19.99* per month! 15Mbps speeds! *$19.99 for the first 10GB and just $1 per GB after that" Pft.

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.

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.

Money

[Wellington Grey]

But analysts said Cingular is concerned that offering Wi-Fi calls inside a home could hurt its parent companies' landline businesses. Plus, there's the question of how to charge customers, who might expect free calls.

Yes, we mustn't let new technology get in the way of existing revenue streams.

-Grey

I'm looking forward to a big surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Biggest surprise? The cell phone conversation is not dropped I already have a WiFi phone. It doesn't even attempt to be a cellphone. It's pure WiFi. It's a UT Starcom F1000. It can't even make it longer than 12 hours without CRASHING. That's not 12 hours of active use, that's not even making a single phone call, that's just sitting there on my desk, right next to my WiFi box, doing nothing. It goes into "downloading firmware" mode and that's it, it needs to be power cycled, and there's no way to stop it from doing this. This was the device I paid $100 for from Broadvoice. If someone could just point me in the direction of a plain old WiFi device that doesn't crash all the time, that doesn't miss my calls, and that reliably links in to my WiFi, I'll be plenty surprised by that, thank you. I have just ordered a conventional phone adapter to replace it. I guess my Starcom will go into my closet somewhere and then I'll sell it on Ebay as an antique 50 years from now for $10,000 which will be enough for me to get a latte, if they still make those and they're still legal.

------------
Contact management, calendar management, phone backup

British Telecom already sells wireless VOIP cells

[evilandi]

British Telecom's "Fusion" service already provides this. It uses a variant of either the Motorola Razr V3 or Motorola V560 cellphone with Bluetooth, and is shipped with a dedicated BT Bluetooth & WiFi ADSL router that handles both the VOIP calls and regular broadband access for home computers. It's available to anyone in the UK with a British Telecom phoneline that supports ADSL broadband - which is over 99% of the population, including almost all rural areas such as mine.

Most people think the calls route over the normal analogue voice line, but the giveaway that it is VOIP is on this page where they state "can make up to three simultaneous calls", obviously this is must therefore be routed over the ADSL side rather than the voice side.

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:It already prefers wifi over cellular

[weave]

I assume that those minutes over wifi aren't going to be free. The call still has to enter the carriers network at some point and they aren't going to invest in this if there is no monetary incentive for them. So if they aren't free, what's the incentive for a consumer to have their calls go over their house wifi instead of using the tower then? What happens when their kid is running bittorrent and clogging up the line?

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.

Biggest Suprise?

[LowbrowDeluxe]

"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!!!!*

Perhaps this guy can use it

[mgabrys_sf]

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.

Amazing Choice of Language and rising DSL Pricing.

[logicnazi]

I really liked how the people interviewed in the article kept saying something like "consumers might expect calling over wi-fi would be free". As if they were somehow being unreasonable or uninformed.

As far as I'm concerned real wi-fi phones which don't even let your carrier know how many wi-fi minutes you are using can't come soon enough. I hate the high prices, ridiculous options and general blood sucking (prices for ringtones) and can't wait till they are the ones begging the technology companies to include support for their off wi-fi network you use when you leave the city or have at least started offering wi-fi type service in cities.

Ultimately of course the upshot of all of this is that we will be paying more for DSL/landline phones as well as for remote cell phone service. In both the landline phone market and the cell phone market massive fixed costs are amortized over a huge number of phone calls. The fixed line phone calls then in effect subsidize DSL service (the phone companies make money on it but wouldn't if they had to do all the maintence/set up the phone lines just for DSL). Similarly all the cellphone calls made in big cities subsidize building cell phone towers in more rural locations. As the distinction between different sorts of data transmission inevitably disappears the price per unit of reasonably low latency Kb must equalize. I mean it really is absurd that it is cheaper to use your phone line for DSL and utilize Skype than it is to call on a real phone. This will force the price of DSL up as it becomes less subsidized by phone calls and the existance of Wi-Fi phones will remove the ability of the cell companies to subsidize the less used more rural towers (unless of course they are just doing things in a really inefficent fashion compared to google/earthlink in SF)

At least this is what happens if the DSL prices aren't constrained by local laws, in which case we will just see more tricks trying to offer tiered access charging for cell phone use (instead of by Mb) or other stupid money generating tricks.

It's aimed at mobile phone companies

[Aceticon]

If you read the article you will notice that this is aimed at saving costs for the mobile companies themselfs, NOT the users.

Notice that the "seamless transition" from of having your mobile communicating over the mobile network to having it use the WiFi network requires a server on the mobile network to support it.

The point here is that many mobile companies also own WiFi hotspot networks. With this kind of phone available they will be able to re-use those networks for mobile coverage, thus freeing more slots on the mobile network (and/or requiring less towers). Commercial WiFi hotspots are typically installed in areas with many potential users around (airports, train-stations, city centers) which are also the areas more congested in terms of mobile calls traffic, thus the potential for savings are very big. If they can get people to also use their own private WiFi hotspots at some, even beter for them.

Maybe some savings will be passed on to the consumers or maybe not. As always, companies try to make as much money as possible, thus they will only pass the savings on to consumers (via reduced prices) if:
a) They still make more money out of it. So for example, expect cheaper (but not free) "home" minutes if you use your own personal WiFi hotspot.
b) They are being squezed by other technologies and need to reduce prices in order to stay competitive.

Hopefully the technology will be implemented in such a way that it might be possible to use it WITHOUT support from the side of the mobile network operator. Quite possibly this first generation won't support it out-of-the-box. Don't expect quite a seamless transition of calls between networks though.

Re:It's aimed at mobile phone companies

[TheRaven64]

No, it's aimed at the end users. Just not yet. You can buy VOIP handsets that connect over 802.11 already. These are significantly cheaper than mobile 'phones. If you live in an area with ubiquitous WiFi, then they may be more economic than a full mobile. As WiFi coverage extends, this will be true for more and more people. This is likely to cut into the profits of the mobile 'phone manufacturers[1] as well as the carriers. Eventually, the VOIP handset market is likely to be as big as the mobile handset market, and the manufacturers want to make sure they have a cut.

[1] Don't make the mistake that many /. readers make of assuming that the handset manufacturers and the carriers have the same adgenda.

Great...

[Cunk]

...yet another technology Verizon will not allow their customers to enjoy. This would be the final straw for me.

Surprise, surprise

[suv4x4]

"Biggest surprise? The cell phone conversation is not dropped when the switch between cellular network and WiFi hotspot takes place."

That'd be the only surprize, since there are phones that use wifi for walkie talkie emulation for some time now.

One could really wonder how is this supposed to work at all, after all the whining from big telcos, how VOIP support needs special quality of service (QoS)to ensure low latency, no skipping, mangling etc. to work.

But then again who believes telcos anyway.

Re:Surprise, surprise

[1uk34dd0]

It does work. I use the BT Fusion service here in the UK and the transfer between mobile/cell network and VoIP is almost seemless everytime. http://www.btfusionorder.bt.com/

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

Dual mode is the easy bit

[EmbeddedJanitor]

It's the clean in-call handover that is hard and will require a Skype-like service that is tied in with the telco's cell handling to get the call handover to happen. That is going to lock you in to your telco so they'll still be able to screw you for the call.

Ericsson demoed some Bluetooth handsets that could do clean handover a long while back. THese would use BT to BT for short distance and could then switch to BT--POTS and finally cell. I don't think this was ever commercialised.

NASA tapping WIFI / VOIP for voice?

[David Hume]

It probably should be, but I have a feeling that the switch only goes one way: cellular to wifi.

all of this raises an interesting question. Is the NSA currently tapping / sniffing the Interenet for voice? That is, tapping / sniffing VOIP?

And if not, will this hasten the day when NASA does so? I can hear it now. "All of these people are now connected end to end via WIFI and VOIP through their cell phones. We must be able to tap / sniff those conversations.
 

Three unreliable technologies, together at last

[PhotoGuy]

Good Lord, combining all three of these frustrating technologies together. VOIP, which in my experience, is choppy and unreliable; cellular service, which is generally poor, and getting worse as they cram more calls into the same bandwidth; and wireless, which never lives up to it's speed/distance claims. The cell phone companies can't seem to pull off not dropping calls between freaking cell towers, how can they promise calls won't be dropped with this technology.

I'm pretty skeptical as to how well this will work.

Calls wont drop with a cell/WiFi transition?

[Shishak]

That means that the phone will keep a VoIP session opened with the cell phone providers switch. The cell phone provider can continue to bill you insane per minute rates while you ride on someone elses network. Sounds like a great deal for the cell phone providers. As a VoIP provider I wonder if I can get a cell phone to connect back to me so I don't have to build network either.

The good news is...

[Art Popp]

The carriers are very happy about this, but, as others have observed the fact that it's VOIP doesn't mean it's "anybody's VOIP" that it works with.

The UMA data network simply allows the carrier turn any WiFi access point into an additional cell tower on their network. The advantage for the consumer, discounted minutes at home. The advantage for the carrier fewer expensive cell towers to cover the same number of people.

In many demographics 40% of people's cellphone calls are made from home. It will be a tremendous savings in standard GSM spectrum to move 40% of the traffic to the 2.4Ghz band.

For the consumer, if your plan had 1000 minutes a month GSM, and an additional 1000 minutes a month over UMA then would you really need to hand $20 a month to a voip carrier? If you spend less than an hour a day talking on the phone, and you make 50% of your calls from home, the answer is no.

UMA phones will let you initiate and receive calls on either the GSM or Wifi networks. UMA phones are designed to hand the call seamlessly between networks. I've used one. They're pretty cool.

Ummmm....

[TubeSteak]

As far as I'm concerned real wi-fi phones which don't even let your carrier know how many wi-fi minutes you are using can't come soon enough.

If you want to talk to anyone, your cellphone-over-wifi connection needs to get terminated back into the regular phone system somehow.

That's what you pay for and it's why all the internet-only VIOP services are free, because they don't connect you into the PSTN.

It's called dividing up the customers

[LeeMeador]

Face it. There is no reason talking on the phone for one minute should cost more than sending and receiving 500K of data. That uses the old way of converting voice to data--64K bits per second. (64,000 bps * 60 secs/min / 8 bits per byte = 480,000 bytes/min)

It is, after all, just data going from point A to point B (and coming back). I don't know the current numbers but, back in the 90's, voice only consumed a few percent of the total of the transferred data.

The network should be good enough to get the data moved in a reasonable time frame.

The devices to convert what the microphone picks up to data packets should not be expensive to buy.

The monthly payment to your ISP should cover the data transfer, even if it is digital voice.

The use of compression should reduce the bandwidth needed by a factor of six (but I'm no expert). That's what I read.

In the US, we add a little bit to our phone bill to subsidize people who live in rural areas. They need longer wires and such than the city folks. That shouldn't add too much to the bill.

The only justification for phone service costing more than that is that we will pay it. It's a classic concept of dividing the market into groups of customers. Some will pay more than others for the same service. You work out a way to get more from those who will pay it while still charging less for those who won't pay more.

Its a tricky thing to work out. The ones who pay more may resist paying more if they know someone else is paying less.

But we have business phones and personal phones and business pays more but they don't really get more. Their phones don't work any better. They don't get extended hours of use. They just pay more for the same thing because they will.

Somehow we have gotten into a situation where the data containing voices costs us more to tranfer than data containing photos or music or email or accounts payable. There is no good reason but the marketers have got us to believe it should be that way.

I think all we are seeing is a market upheaval caused by some people rejecting that premise and others selling stuff to facilitate sending voice data for less.

I should pay an ISP to accept bits from me and transfer them to wherever I want them to go. Some other ISPs will be accepting bits from someone else and sending them to me. For that, they should pay. It's just a messenger service. If they have to subcontract with backbone providers, so be it. They have to charge me enough to take care of that.

I think the "magic" of the technology hides the simple realities from most consumers.

And that's enough babbling for now.