T-Mobile Releases New Card, Outlaws VoIP and IM

An anonymous reader writes "T-Mobile has launched a new 3G data card in the UK, and banned users from using it for VoIP or instant messaging applications." From the article: "Lock cast doubt on the sustainable viability of a mobile operator banning VoIP from its network. 'I think that eventually, if there's customer demand for this, it will happen," Lock said. "Other organizations will come along allowing VoIP. Who do you think is going to win?'"

Comments

Too early to tell

[foundme]

First of all, the summary failed to mention this is a flat-rate plan, and it's currently on internal trial. So this gives possibilities of a data-usage plan which allows VoIP, or when the service finally rolls out, the company will simply drop this restriction if the trial indicates a negative support.

Re:Too early to tell

[StikyPad]

Right -- a tenth of a second is nothing. I live in the South Pacific, and calls to the US on the POTS have a noticable delay -- at least 1-2 seconds. On the other hand, my ping times to the US average about 400MS, I have no problems using VOIP, and the discernable delay is usually less than that of POTS, if it's perceptible at all.

At any rate, delays over 1 second can be irritating, but are still "functional." Unless your conversations are often mistaken for auctions, any delay less than 1s should be largely transparent.

Re:Too early to tell

[shitdrummer]

150ms is only the network delay time between the two devices.

Don't forget that the audio needs to be encoded, packetised and transmitted. Then received, the packets re-assembled in the right order and then decoded back to an audio stream. So it's incorrect to equate 150ms network delay time with 150ms speech delay time on a mobile or standard telephone.

150ms is the recommended maximum network delay for VoIP traffic as any more than that and you start to get noticably annoying delays. You might be happy to put up with delay on your phone calls but a lot of people aren't (i.e. managers, salesmen, me etc).

Also, I doubt a call from California to Tennessee would travel mostly over POTS. I'd say the call would be over more advanced infrastructure than 2 copper wires, and in fact you're probably going over a VoIP WAN link at some stage.

Additionally (in reference to another post by someone else), you shouldn't get a delay of anywhere near 1 to 2 seconds on any (well, to be honest, most) telephone call to anywhere in the world. That is extremely unacceptable delay and carriers would want to know if you're routinely getting this sort of delay. I agree it does happen occasionally but usually only when the default routes are down or fully used and you end up getting routed around the world a couple of times or over a poorly configured IP trunk. If you do get a call with this much delay, hang up and call again. You'll probably find the default routes have freed up by then and you will usually get a better quality line. Usually. :)

I was testing an E&M voice tie line from Sydney to NY. One of the tests we performed was to loop the NY end so I could hear my speech in the receiver. The delay was at worst 1 second. Sydney to NY and Back, around 1 second delay over 4 copper wires and various other network infrastructure in between.

Shitdrummer.

Re:IM

[zakezuke]

A ban on IM alone will ensure that no one uses their product. I think that I am currently the only person in the US who isn't on AIM/MSN/Yahoo/IRC. I would love to be able to listen to their customer support calls: "C: AIM isn't working. S: We don't support AIM. C: We seem to have a bad connection, you don't what?!" Do they have their own private IM service they are planning on offering?

The way it works in the states is... you have a choice between SMS and I believe "T-zones" is what it's called..... internet service basicly. SMS gives you access to Aim-ICQ/MSN/Yahoo for a fee per message, or you can get it at a flat rate for a tad more. You can pay extra to get unlimited text messages, or you can go with a data plan and, if you have a phone that supports it, run a true blue IM client on your phone. T-Zones costs a little more than unlimited SMS, not all phones support it, but you can login to multiable services at any given time. The SMS version basicly relays your messages though their standard text message service.

The artical isn't clear on this subject, but I imagine you can still have your IM, just so long as you use it through their SMS network, a fee per message deal or additional subscription. Just a true blue IM client is banned... which I suspect it's because it simply can NOT be metered.

Sounds great to me!

[cduffy]

At 2.5x less than the market rate for such services, I'll subscribe and then tunnel my traffic via OpenVPN.

what about AIM Express?

[PrescriptionWarning]

i can see how they can block ports to the AIM and other messenger clients, but what about the java (or whatever) web-based AIM Express?

Re:WTF is this service anyway?

[timmyf2371]

Can someone explain this to me??? I read the whole article and I'm still not sure what super-3G is... is it an unlimited-use wireless broadband service? That's my best guess from the article but I'm still not sure... Can someone clue me in?

"Normal" 3G is a technology which operates on the 2100mhz spectrum (in the UK) and in addition to services such as voice calls and SMS, it allows data connections of upto 384kbps.

This so-called super 3G is actually called HSDPA (high speed downlink packet access); essentially, a software/firmware upgrade to the cellular network equipment the operators use, and is commonly referred to as 3.5G.

It's similar to how some of the mobile networks in the UK upgraded their networks to support EDGE (2.75G) in addition to GPRS (2.5G), and is probably the last significant speed bump mobile data connects get before the introduction of 4G (in the distant future).

The unlimited use idea is something unique to T-Mobile right now. As far as I'm aware, none of the other UK networks offer such a package, and the actual unlimited part of the service isn't anything to do with the actual network equipment itself; merely a service they offer, enabled via their billing systems.

Please remember

[saikou]

1. It's T-Mobile UK, not T-Mobile USA. Not yet, anyways. Web browsing with 3G speeds for 20 pounds a month? Goodluck finding that :) (eventually it probably will be available from T-Mobile USA but not yet)
2. It's a business plan. If you look at a regular "non-professional" plan then you'll notice that even more restrictive full fineprint says:

Minimum term contact and credit check applies. Compatible handset required. Fair use policy applies: Relax + web 'n' walk and Flext + web 'n' walk price plans provide unlimited internet surfing on mobile handsets in the UK. To ensure a high quality of service for all our customers, they are not to be used for other activities such as (but not limited to): modem access for computers, internet based video/audio streaming services, peer to peer file sharing, internet based video download and internet based telephony. If such use is detected, notice may be given, after which network protection controls may be applied which will result in a reduced speed of transmission.

(emp. mine). Professional plan says nothing about "modem access for computers" (VPN) or downloads and such.
Given how much talking on the phone costs in UK I'd say it's very clear why they don't want to allow VOIP. Texting is not that expensive but still provides a nice revenue.

Re:IM

[scumbaguk]

T-mobile and most other UK networks used to have free sms up until around 2000. This helpd develope a massive TXT culture where people could SMS even with no credit on pay as you go phones.

Afterall SMS are sent in blank space in the background comunication required to hold a connection to the tower. So certainly delivering SMS within a cell is virtual costless.

Once SMS was secured as a well used medium, prices where introduced and suckers continue to pay.

O2 offer thousands of free SMS a month even on their pay as you go packages so it's not accross the all netoworks. Different operators have different packages. T-mobile normaly always being one of the worst except for basic calls only packages. So I use tmob for my personal mobile, o2 for buisness 3G phone and datacard.

Re:IM

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's called "SMS" where T-Mobile charges up to 10 per message (incoming and outgoing)

Well, this article is about T-Mobile UK, where they probably don't charge for incoming SMS (just like in the rest of Europe).

Bluetooth crippled on many phones

[Dr_Barnowl]

Networks will disable various features on the phone at their whim.

In the case of Bluetooth, one of the most common things to disable is the OBEX (object exchange) protocol, which prevents standard computer drivers from exchanging files with the phone, or other profiles like the modem profile, the headset profile, etc.

This ties you into using the provider-supplied software, which is often a crippleware "lite" piece of crap ; surprise, you can upgrade it for *only $39.99*!

So having a Bluetooth transceiver in your phone is not necessarily synonymous with having Bluetooth features, depending on your provider.

150ms is fictional / misunderstanding

[billstewart]

First of all, the 150ms recommendation was originally for in-continent calls - the standards people recognized that transoceanic calls might need to be as long as 400ms, and that's still better than satellite. Remember that the speed of light in fiber is about 8-10ms per 1000 miles, depending on how straight your fiber routes are (it's a "miles of fiber per miles of route" issue, not an attenuation issue) and just because you can theoretically get halfway around the world in 100-125 ms, doesn't mean that real cable routes will let you do that. India and New York are just far apart, and you've got to deal with it, unless you want to drill a hole through the earth's core.

Second, aside from what the _standards_ say, calls don't become "functionally useless" above 150ms - just a bit slower, and if they're much slower you might not want to use that cheap speakerphone. Back in the old days, when we used to walk 20 miles barefoot to the schoolhouse uphill both ways, satellite was the standard way to talk across oceans and sometimes even within the same continent, and they were ok. Not great, and sometimes annoying, but ok.

Direct-dialed calls from California to Tennessee almost certainly *are* carried on POTS, though calling-card calls to India usually aren't. POTS isn't just analog-on-copper - the call gets digitized to 64kbps PCM at your first telco office, switched through circuit-switches, and carried on T1 lines (1.5 Mbps synchronous channelized stuff). The T1s get muxed together onto fiber, of course, and the fiber's usually DWDM stuff that puts 16-64 2.5-10Gbps channels on each pair, but with the major US telco carriers, most of the calls are still old-school as far as switching goes. LA to Nashville is about 2000 road-miles, so if you get a good fiber route it should be about 20ms one-way.

That'll be changing a lot within the next 5 years - the old phone switches are becoming obsolete, and soft-switch technology is getting a lot cheaper, and it'll be the costs of switches (including parts and labor) that drives a lot of the change - fiber bandwidth is so cheap that it's cheaper to haul intra-US calls uncompressed compared to deploying telco quantities of compression equipment. Another big driver is mobile phones, since they already use a compressed-voice infrastructure.

International's a lot different - bandwidth across oceans is expensive, so it's worth paying to compress the voice, especially if you either don't use IP or use trunked compression protocols that don't need to waste 40 bytes of IP/UDP/RTP header on a 10-byte voice sample. Those 1 cent calls to Asia are doing a lot of that.

I just bought one of these

[yoz]

I've been on the lookout for a mobile data card in the UK ever since using a Verizon EVDO card in the US; it saved our arses at ETech when the network went down on the last day, and we had to demo our web service.

Up until now all the pricing for mobile data's been around 70 quid/month for 200MB, which is far enough from flat rate to make me worried about using it repeatedly. However, this is 20 quid for 2 gig, and that's fantastic. 20 quid is more than worthwhile insurance if I have to give even one demo a month - the fact that I can setup and get going with no futzing with local networks is a major boon.

When I bought it they said I could use it for anything. I may pop over the road at lunchtime and give the T-Mobsters a grilling about these restrictions. Mind you, I really can't see how they'll enforce this; so many people have their IM client set to start automatically on boot and sign-on on network connection that it's going to be a major pain, and T-Mob deserve all the problems they get if they think they can enforce it.