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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?'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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