Slashdot Mirror
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?'"
Such high speeds would seem to make the new data card ideal for applications such as Internet telephony and instant messaging.
I have a feeling that 7mbps is a tad overkill for instant messanging.
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.
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
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
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.
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?
I'm assuming T-mobile doesn't want to allow IM/VoIP because that cuts into their mobile phone business. Encrypted traffic, anyone?
My bicyles
TMobile says that they are doing this for business reasons up front. That's much better than inventing some legalistic bs about how blocking IM is a vital part of network security and war on terror.
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.
I am not alone in this. Ignore these sentiments at your peril.
Since the telephone cash cow has died, I feel like the telecoms aren't coming around. This is great news! They still get to charge you for the connection, usually at a higher price, while someone else provides the service!
More money and less work doesn't seem like it's enough for T-Mobile or Verizon. They want more. They want the right to prevent competition and continue charging customers for services that are completely free on today's Internet. This is so 1990's. I haven't heard an idea this bad since Beenz.
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).
I am interested in the cards that tmobile has to offer for laptops. I want an expresscard for my macbook pro. I have the sidekick and love it and would hate to have a mobile phone provider and a mobile data provider.
They currently have an older pcmcia style card, but I have seen nothing about the next generation of cards. I would have thought enough vendors have the newer, faster standard on their laptops (mostly more professional level laptops) that the datacom people would follow suit.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
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
At 2.5x less than the market rate for such services, I'll subscribe and then tunnel my traffic via OpenVPN.
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.
Get Less. :)
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
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?
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.
The $6.99 plan is quite useful. It gives you unlimited access to all data services on your phone, and lets you tether to your phone to use GPRS. The "catch" is that you can "only check e-mail" while tethered. Of course, with a SOCKS proxy running on port 110 in my office, it's basically unlimited Internet. Very helpful when you're at a coffee shop and want to surf, but don't want to pay $100/hr or whatever hotspots charge these days :)
My other car is first.
[...]while the Japanese are unable to duplicate the American films by a flank assault, they can destroy it by this video cassette recorder.
I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
Jack Valenti, at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee 04-12-1982
So, one must be mad thinking that the cellphone companies will roll over for VOIP and lose their voice cashcow. Have you actually looked at how much they charge? $0.75/min for an international phonecall that costs $0.05 (PC-to-Phone, from Deltathree in my case). Considering it costs cell companies maybe all of $0.02, if that, to actually carry my call (which they ALSO do over the internet fiber, with a lossy compression, and not over the analog wire like the phone companies)
The companies are not going to adopt new technology when they are already making good proffits, they never have and never will.
Plenty of examples:
1) 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
2) T. Edison, a DC power tycoon, squashing N. Tesla's AC until he got bitchslaped by competition
3) film industry decrying VCR in the 1980's
4) Apple getting cozy with their market share in the early 90's and cutting R&D,
5) oil companies in the 2000's squashing alternative fuel research
Why do people want to use VOIP to emulate a phone, when the phone has a built in phone? And why would they want to use an IM service when the phone has it built in?
Sounds like somebody's prices aren't very competitive.
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:
(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.
Hyperom.com
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 2600 radio show, Off the Hook, regularly features a guy named Bernie S who calls into the show on his cell phone. They frequently discuss how voice quality of phones has dropped significantly as the cell phone networks went all digital and crammed as many conversations as they could into the smallest amount of bandwidth possible. Thus, like everyone else on a cell phone these days, Bernie's high-tech whiz-bang phone makes him sound like crap to everyone on the other end of the line.
Evidently, his phone is one of these that you can connect to your computer and get high-speed Internet access. One day, he called into the show via Skype and they discovered that when using VoIP through the phone's Internet connection, the voice quality was FAR better than when he just calls with the phone itself. (I imagine it wasn't any cheaper, though.)
Of course, after marveling at the voice quality, they went off into conspiracy theory land, but it makes you wonder what kind of service cell phone providers *could* be providing if they actually had an interest in providing any sort of quality to their customers.
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.
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.
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
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.