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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?'"
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?
Philosophy.
cheap local government-backed citywide wifi will win
you don't make money as a telephone carrier by allowing people to have telephone conversations without paying you. you don't make money going form a 0.99/ min model to a 39.99/ mo model. so you don't let them use voip
so you drive your customers to wifi
the customer is always right, and the customer has discovered he can pay less
who wants to make the next must-have killer gadget? who wants to make the next must-have ipod?
you, whomever you are, who makes a small, sexy, cheap voip via wifi phone wins that distinction and that wad of cash
gentleman, start your engines, the race is on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Exactly.
Not to mention that VOIP is functionally useles with response times greater than 150ms. Since this is a new infrastructure for a flat-rate data plan I'm not surprised that T-Mobile is blocking (or purposefully not paying attention to) UDP heavy packets (IM) and VOIP which would require some QoS crafting to ensure reliability. By restricting certain services they can be in a better position to get meaningful usage data and network utilization stats out of the internal testing.
While cell companies make the most profit from voice services, don't believe for a second that should VOIP or other data services become more in demand that they won't fill that need... with a slight hike in data connection rates calculated for a price sweet spot.
Do not taunt Happy-Fun Ball
I can understand banning VOIP. Not that everybody's going to like it, but it's at least rational. They're in the business of providing telephone service, after all. But I can't even imagine being online without having IM service running in the background, it's so central to how I work now. Why would you provide internet service and then ban that? Just because you get $.10 a text message, which nobody is going to be sending and receiving with a laptop anyway?
It seems likely that a large percentage of the people who get this service will end up violating the agreement without even thinking about it, just because it's habit.
because all those "cell companies" in the UK simply resell T-mobiles networks (Virgin Mobile/CarphoneW etc etc) they are known as "Virtual Mobile Network Providers" virtual as in they dont own anything except a room full of salespeople, T-Mobile own towers, real bricks and mortar infrastructure, and they also have the largest network which leaves Vodaphone and Orange and i doubt they will bend over if there is cash to be made
the UK cell market is an oligolopy due to there are only so many places to put the towers and nobody wants a cell tower near them (NIMBY)
At one time people thought having more than 640K of memory was overkill too.
Well as long as ssh isn't blocked they'll never know someone isn't using an IM/IRC client (thanks to naim/irssi/screen on a remote server).
The point of cards like this from the standpoint of the cell companies, is to enable business workers. They won't get away with outlawing VPN connections, and thus my own use of VoIP would simply transit the VPN. FOK THEM.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
When you don't want to offer a service your customer wants, how do you pull that stunt off? By making sure nobody offers it.
Over here, we pay by the minute. For cell as well as for landline. Why? Because no Telco ever offered a flat phone fee. Would we buy it? You bet. But you can only buy what is offered.
No Telco will offer VoIP or IMs. That's where their money comes from, phone and SMS services. Allowing VoIP or IM on a flat data connection would kill their main source of income.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
it is the death of american productivity and economic growth if shortsighted entrenched corporate interests are allowed to squash innovation with armies of lawyers
then the sun will set on the usa, defeated not from without by terrorism, but defeated from within by rapacious greed consuming american ingenuity and therefore economic growth
you know the telcos, riaa, mpaa, and cable companies would squash arpanet in the 1970s if they saw where we were going
i'll say that again: if it were up to entrenched corporate interests, there would be no internet
entrenched corporate interests would rather no more technological progress happen
it messes with their entrenched business models
god forbid uncertainty and risk enter their accounting sheets
no, we should all give up progress so there is no uncertainty in large corporation's financial outlook, right?
they are working hard to squash innovation, and given enough time and pressure, they might succeeed
and then it is good morning india and china, new captains of industry, with more pragmatic approaches to ip law and technological innovation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As another poster pointed out, moving from a pricing model of 0.99cpm for phonecalls, to unlimited phone calls for 39.99 a month, is NOT cost-effective for the phone company.
They want to sell you the mobile broadband AND still keep their existing voice carrier market, ie have their cake and eat it too.
Not necessarily. Yahoo! Messenger for example has also an option to use voice...
I don't know why VOIP would be functionally useless above 150ms unless it was designed incorrectly. I routinely have longer round trim latency than that on my cell phone calls from California to Tennessee, and that's basically POTS most of the way. A phone call from one side of the planet to the other that takes a satellite hop will have four times that much round trip latency at a minimum.
Who do you think is going to win?
No idea who will win. All I know is that if a telecom is involved, the general public are likely to lose. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
thats right, remember who needs who.
tell me again, who needs T-mobile?
Enjoy Every Sandwich
Oh an Anonymous Coward. I'm sure T-mobile are quaking in their boots right now.
It's their network, they can apply all the restrictions they like. You don't like it? Go elsewhere.
Deleted
There is no such thing as to much bandwidth. Never forget that. :)
I generally like T-Mobile. Unlike Verizon, they don't hobble the BlueTooth on their phones. I can upload and download files to my computer without using the network. I can take all the MP3s on my computer and use them for ring tones. I can use my phone to transfer files. Most importantly, I can sync my cellphone with the phonebook on my computer. Verizon makes all sorts of excuses why they can't let you connect your BlueTooth phone directly to your computer, but it mainly has to do with selling ringtones and charging you for sending pictures back and forth between your phone and your computer.
Unlike ATT/Cingular, T-Mobile also haven't changed my terms of service multiple times without telling me, "extended" my contract without telling me, or charged me for things that are suppose to be included in my service. Last time I had ATT, they suddenly decided that my house was located in a "roaming" area and charged me 50 cents per minute for using my cellphone.
At least T-Mobile is being pretty up front about the whole thing -- not allowing IM and VOIP is strictly a business decision. They've concluded that most business users aren't heavy users of IM and VOIP, and by not offering these services, they can prevent non-business users from signing up. I bet its more to make sure they don't oversubscribe the network more than anything else. Allowing VOIP and IM would probably more than double the number of people who'd want to sign up.
I also find hope that T-Moble says this is not necessarily a permanent decision. If their customers demand it, they'll open up the service to VOIP and IM. I bet you they do this with in 12 to 18 months. Once the service gets going, and they increase the available bandwidth, they'll start to welcome non-business users.
Europeans sticking to horses & wind sailing (until a whole new country, America, invented the steam-boat, the steam-engine/railroads, the radio, the light-buld, and the airplane...
Say whaaat?
steam engine
railroad
airplane...Ok, I'll grant that to a point. It still required lots of prior art.
radio
light bulb...Maybe you meant this: "Thomas A. Edison of the United States invented the first commercially successful incandescent lamp around 1879" emphasis mine.
It's a fine line between "insightful" and "funny". Which one were you trying for?
What?
"I would like to be the first one to say this:
*** Screw you, T-Mobile! ***
I do whatever I want with my hardware. I won't let a company dictate terms to me. Period. I will either find some competitor of yours, or I will hack my way through your restrictions, thumb my nose at you, and help others do the same."
When I see these sorts of posts on Slashdot, I am amazed at the disconnect some people have from reality - you know, folks who complain about Netflix throttling their extremely heavy use, Comcast warning people about using a Terabyte of bandwidth monthly, etc.
Do you just not get that T-Mobile is HAPPY when customers like you leave? You cost them significant amounts of money! For that matter, other T-Mobile customers (like me) will be happy to have you hop on over to Cingular or Verizon, since we're subsidizing you.
When a money sink decides to stop patronizing a business, the company has to say the usual "we're sorry to see you go" platitudes; but behind the scenes they're popping the champagne corks.
#DeleteChrome
I personally love tmobile. Unlike all the other US carriers they actually let you get stuff done with your phone. I have their unlimited data plan, and while its not high speed, tmobile lets me hook it up to my computer as a modem, and it works fine for ssh sessions and limited browsing when I'm on the road or not in a hot spot. It's only $20/mo for unlimited data, Verizon charges $60/mo for unlimited data, and then to use the phone as a modem they charge another $30.
I don't know how good actual "3G" is, is it better than verizon's evdo network? Is Verizon's evdo considered 3g or is it 2.5g?
My point is, VoIP doesn't work over the evdo network, latencies are just too high, and call quality is horrible, also, you can't do any QoS over the link.. basically unless actual 3G is a whole lot better than evdo, VoIP wouldn't work anyway, so the fact that they are "disallowing" it is like someone saying "Don't jump a car off a cliff" its just not a good idea.
Now, IM being outlawed is another story, but I use IM on my phone all the time in the US across their low speed plan... I think UK customers should get angry, but T-Mobile US seems much nicer, and is the best wireless carrier in the US as far as I'm concerned (been with Verizon, ATT, Cingular, Qwest, and Tmobile).
As soon as those packets get wrapped in IPSec, T-Mobile can do nothing about it...
Well, T-Mobile can DROP them... Problem solved.
The issue is deeper than that; its the fact that capitalism has failed. We should just cut our losses and put an end to this miserable system before we're really screwed.
Yes, let's jump out of the frying pan and into the fire (socialism, communism for example). Capitalism is not perfect, far from it actually. Considering all the alternatives that have been tried, capitalism is the most successful and still continues to be so.
You are right about one thing however, something has failed. It's the people that have failed. They've failed to give a damn about their future. Such attitudes of complacency will destroy a civilization regardless of the forms of governance that it embodies.
For freedom to succeed, we all must be ever vigilant!
Life is not for the lazy.
Hey, it's almost enough bandwidth to start carrying Net Neutrality rants - if anybody pays attention, they'll get spanked pretty fast, and deservedly so.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Someday your house will burn down, you'll go to the insurance company and they won't accept your claim.
You'll go to the judge and he'll say "I'm using the same insurance I don't feel like subsidizing you, live on the street."
And the circle of capitalist apathy will be complete.