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Danes Getting Hybrid IP Mobiles
praps writes "UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) technology is here — well, in Denmark — meaning users can access mobile and Internet (IP) telephony on the same phone. The same phone that works outside the home as a normal mobile phone that automatically seeks out a mobile network can also be used as an IP phone, which uses wireless technology to make very low-cost calls."
Hopefully we'll get IPv6 going so we can speed up cost savers such as this.
Although maybe the cell companies will see this and sabotage the IPv6 process.
The only problem I see with this is taking off from the house while in a call. Cell phone latencies for connect are in the multi-second range. May not be an issue as we already have call hand-offs between towers. Also, sometimes my WiFi gets iffy for no good reason. I'd like a smooth handoff to cell in this situation as well. But anything to cut into rediculous cell bills is a good thing!
Just goes to show what you can do without corporations owning your lawmakers.
I suppose any day now some vested external interest will claim this is denying them hard earned income and try to sway the Danish parliament to ban this or at the very least put it under the supervision of an oligarchy.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
In the future, the technology "could also be used an IP phone if the user is in a Wi-Fi hotspot outdoors, such as an airport, cafe, or conference centre for example. But we chose to concentrate first on usage at home," TeliaSonera spokesman Rune Fick Hansen told AFP.
I would like that hotspot capability more than at home.
.... Which is WHY ISN'T THIS IN THE USA? Are our telcos not forward thinking enough?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Yes, I need two! One for each 'hybrid' that I drive. None of that silly taking-it-with-me-between-the-two nonsense.
Now, how to get them to Denmark . . .
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I like how Denmark has it first... even though it was made by a swedish-finnish company. It would be great to have though.
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion...
Meanwhile, we can't even get regular dual-SIM cell phones here in America, because the service providers are so paranoid about losing customers.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Do you think this will ever make it to North America? All the phone lines and cell phone towers are owned by a very small number of very large corporations. I don't see them allowing us to make phone calls cheaper. Even if we eventually are able to get full internet access via our cell phones, I'm sure they will make sure to block all VOIP technology.
If you look at the current situation, the cell phone companies have already considerably restricted consumer choice with respect to the physical cell phones. Everywhere else in the world, you buy a phone, then choose a provider. Here, the phone is locked to a provider, so you're forced to buy the phone with the provider.
For example, I'm with Virgin Mobile in Canada, which is on a CDMA network. However, there's only 4 phones available with Virgin Mobile, which really blows. I'd really like a samsung flip phone, but I'm stuck with a Nokia (the other choice was Audiovox).
Tourgasm sucked, it would only show maybe 30 seconds of Dane's standup. Why should I care about what mobile he's getting?
I have such a phone, in a beta-test. Its a cell-phone most of the time, but switches to my home WiFi network when I'm home. Tester-agreement prohibits me from saying much of anything about it. But it exists, its here, I use it, I like it.
..as neat as the idea is, though, and ignoring for the moment how quickly the US telcos would put the arm on their purchased elected officials should any glimmer of this arrive here, I wonder about the privacy implications. Wifi network traffic is vulnerable to interception, as well as it being the responsibility of the provider (the airport, coffee shop, or whatever) to filter and moderate what's being done on their bandwidth and keep their asses covered in case someone decides to do something illegal and/or stupid from their public network. How secure could using an IP phone via a public hotspot be? And how quickly until the TLAs demand logs and tapping rights?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
You can do this today, in the US, using the HTC Wizard (aka Cingular 8125) and a SIP-enabled softphone like SJPhone. This app is pretty demanding of the Wizard, but the newer phones (TyTN, Artemis, etc.) should be able to handle it no problem.
Here's a link from 2004 about how to do something similar.
The Nokia E60, E61 and E70 are capable of SIP calls over WiFi.
I'll hopefully be getting mine this week, in the UK.
RegardselFarto
but someone esle in the test should reply as AC with all the gory details. At least tell us who it is so that we can either be looking for it or give up all hope of getting it in our area.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My Nokia E61 let me also use VOIP where WIFI is available. You don't have to have specials telco contracts, so I really don't get the scoop.
This made me think.
Would it make sense for a hardware company to manufacture a purely IP-based phone which does not connect to the POTs at all? It would be designed to be used in cities which have wireless clouds; kind of like a nextel direct-connect feature.
Call it, "Cityphone" or "Cloudphone".
Sure, you could only use it to communicate with other phones of the same type on IP networks - but I think it could catch on as a handy, low-cost device for intra-city communications.
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
Just because you hadn't heard about it, or aren't forward thinking enough to do a search, doesn't mean it's not in the USA. Just because the article said "world's first" didn't make it so.
g 2006/tc20060814_285305.htm
4 6
s &file=article&sid=5708
0 6-7-28-Nokia-Takes-Dual.html
Business Week:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/au
Wi-Fi Planet
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/36287
Daily Wireless:
http://www.dailywireless.org/modules.php?name=New
From the Daily Wireless page:
"Indeed, T-Mobile is not the only telco pushing into at-home wireless services. Already, AT&T (T) expects to introduce two new at-home offerings in the coming months."
This page:
http://www.blackberrytoday.com/articles/2006/7/20
Says there's reportadly 20 UMA trials going on right now.
Just wait till Wimax (or something like it) takes off. You'll be able to bypass the mobile phone companies wherever you are.
I have a samsung sch-a630 that uses CDMA on Verizon's network. Since Verizon uses cdma you should be able to use any of the phones that samsung claims are verizon phones. http://samsung.com/products/mobilephones/verizon/i ndex.asp I would suggest asking a Virgin Mobile representitive if they would be willing to activate a phone from that list before you buy it, I have heard on slashdot talk of vendor locked phones that will not let you switch networks.
Give me that with en open source firmware. A 1 gb memory with MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. Encryption for voice chat, SMS, etc. Public keys. Ad-hoc P2P networking.
...In the future, the technology "could also be used an IP phone if the user is in a Wi-Fi hotspot outdoors, such as an airport, cafe, or conference centre for example. But we chose to concentrate first on usage at home,"...
So from a functionality perspective, this is just a regular cellphone away from home. No wi-fi hotspot. At home it has the marginal added functionality of using wi-fi.
A massproduced cellphone that also uses wi-fi hotspots would be *big* news. Otherwise, not very interesting.
BTW: How do you implement the "wi-fi at home only" crippling?
"Fix it"
The Nokia E60, E61 and E70 are capable of SIP calls over WiFi.
I'll hopefully be getting mine this week, in the UK.
Mostly they are cool phones. I have an E70, the VPN sucks because you can't configure it without a special software suite from Nokia and the display rotation is a bit slow the E70's the fold open QWERTY keyboard is brilliant though and it has backlit keys like a MacBook Pro. The Blackberry and Exchange clients mostly make up for the sucky VPN client. Some people also gripe about the lack of a front mounted camera for video calls but I can't say that I miss the feature. The E70 also has a really good LCD display.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Mod this guy up. Hope you're looking. Anyways, I meant for actual cell calls, the latency seems to be a few seconds for connect. I did notice horrid latencies with EDGE, around a second like you said. UMTS/HSDPA I heard has better latencies--thanks for the info.
I need my phone to automatically seek out 'linksys'.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Mmmh, sounds tasty. Suggested campaign slogan: "Chat'n'Snack" (though users are advised to watch out for crumbs which might fall into the wireless Internet tubes).
Bet they won't do it. I can't even get qwest (a sprint reseller) to activate a sprint labelled phone. Their computer systems knows which ESNs were sold to which telco and won't activate one that came from another (even if its really the same) network.
US carriers will welcome UMA, because they designed it and they control it. They can implement it so that IP calls still use your minutes -- it's cheaper for them, not for you.
To IP or not to IP, that is the question
Generally speaking neither sprint nor verizon will let you use someone else's phone. The GSM providers won't offer you the option either, but at least it's GSM, and you can just pop your SIM into it, provided it's unlocked. (I have a V300 that I got unlocked as a backup phone.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The prospect of these are making the USA wireless phone giants (Cingular, VZW, Sprint/Nextel) piss their corporate pants right now. If they don't hurry up and get this new technology artificially outlawed, or otherwise under the thumbs of their control, then the prospect of widespread free WiFi/WiMAX and a bazillion little mom & pop sized VoIP providers all over the country could threaten the very core of GSM/CDMA network providers existance. They will not stand still and allow a repeat of... like how in the late 1990's everybody and their uncle popped up with little local dialup ISPs everywhere and the big telcos were just sat back and let it happen becuase they thought it was a passing fad, but it took ten years to finally quash the biggest part of that, but now they're stil dealing with the likes of Netzero and PeoplePC... nope, the big cellphone giants have learned to take possible emerging technologies VERY seriously now, and will go to great lengths, legal or illegal it don't matter, to ensure their world will not get crumbled away by a new kid on the block that has the possibility of making them irrelevant. They've already got some kind of under the table cartel-like thing happening to try to drive Nokia out of the USA and back to Europe... just look at all the lawsuit and FTC investigation crap that's being dealt to Nokia right now.
One problem with this concept is that many hotspot operators require you to authenticate through a browser. That won't work on Wi-Fi enabled phones. George Ou wrote about this. 802.1x may be a solution but there are currently few operators that support it.
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Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
no one says it will be cheaper for YOU.
many people will tell you that they can't get cell reception in their homes and so still use a land line for most of their calling rather than going "mobiles only". this is aimed sqarely at those people.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
Many/most premium phones are subsidised by the cell companies to customers on plans. Give 'm an email phone and they'll send emails, give 'em a camera and they'll send photos.
There is no incentive to include Wifi to bypass the carrier.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I found a company that supplied me with an E70 on this (USA) side of the pond. Dropped my T-Mobile SIM card in it and it works fine on the cell network and connects to my asterisk server while I'm at home. It's not quite as smooth as I'd like it to be -- I sometimes have to turn it off to get it to pick up the wifi network and it seems like you have to manually toggle it between Internet and Cellular calls -- doesn't look like you can configure it to try one and fail over if that doesn't work. That's just firmware stuff, though, so maybe they'll fix those things in a rev or two. Still, it lets me use the same handset no matter where I am and no matter what sort of phone calls I'm making. Can't beat that. You can also turn on T-Mobile's unlimited GPRS data service for an extra $30 a month and connect a laptop to the Internet through the phone's bluetooth networking.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm holding out for a wifi-enabled version of the trolltech phone. Give me that, and Asterisk, and the glorified bitpushers also known as wireless operators can kiss my ass.
SIP for the vast majority of the traffic, and a pay-as-you-go SIM for E911 and occasional in-the-middle-of-nowhere use. Oh, and push email done right, without getting RIMmed with patent troll taxes.
I had heard T-mobile was test marketing this in the US to address holes in coverage in residential and rural areas. I've been a long time customer with them, and my move to a new house has made their service unbearable. An inside source told me to hold on a little longer, as they're planning the Wifi phones for US market soon. My biggest concern would be the handhelds we get. Are we going back to brick phones to support the battery requirements? Or will we just suffer with 30 minutes of battery life? It seem the cell phone manufacturers have been all about putting bling into the phone rather than making the phone itself better - this progression of technology makes me fear that they still haven't addressed battery concerns...
Do you actually know what UMA is? I have absolutely no idea why this complete confusion of ideas keeps coming up. I've even read the once excellent Ars Technica claim UMA is something carriers are scared of. Right now, the only major carriers that might be scared of it in the US are Verizon and Sprint. Because they can't use it. It's a GSM technology.
UMA does not cut into an operator's revenue stream. It frees up revenue because the operator is not having to put up towers to get coverage and capacity for every single building in the world. If YOU, the user, save money, it'll only be because the operator is giving you discounts for using UMA, not because you're sticking it to the man by using it, somehow bypassing the carrier. Far from it. You're using the carrier either way.
UMA is not "I can bypass the cellphone company to make free calls", it's "I can route the last mile of my calls through either the radio waves to a tower or via the Internet to a gateway at my carrier, either way getting to my carrier who'll then route the call as necessary." It's a great technology, but what makes it great is that it means that people can make coverage where they currently have blackspots.
What's confused some people is they've read all this crap about Skype phones, and think that UMA is this. It isn't. It's GSM routed over the Internet. Skype phones are something else entirely.
Other people are confused because they've heard it's VoIP. VoIP does not mean "Cheap ways to bypass the phone companies", it's a just a name given to any form of two-way voice traffic routed over IP packets. Just because using Vonage over cable is "sticking it" to AT&T&T doesn't mean that all forms of VoIP are.
This is why T-Mobile and Cingular are members of the UMA consortium and are planning to roll it out here in the US. Yes, they are. Yes, they've made announcements to that effect. It may make calls cheaper. More importantly though it'll make calling more reliable. No more blackspots in the kitchen. Nice.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Cool. I was the tech guy in the beginning. We worked on Nokias and used bluetooth for the home network. But had to many problems with the bluetooth intergration. So the project was put on hold. Looks like they finaly got it to work. (Not thanks to me :) /M
Dude, update yoru worldview, most state owned companies have been sold off to private investors in the last 10 years.
The two biggest examples are the railways and the telephone company, but there are many more.
The Danish Radio (think: BBC), the hospitals and educational system are still run by the state, but to great benefit for all so that's not likely to change.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Nokia has also been doing a pilot in the town of Oulu in Finland, using Nokia 6136 phones. From the article "The pilot project is a joint cooperation between Nokia, the DNA/Finnet group and the City of Oulu".
Selecting only "WiFi" on Nokia's web-based handset select web page
left 3 handsets showing (when I used it a week or so ago); one is
a "clam-shell" design that suggests you'd be more likely to use
its WiFi features to access files to ber massaged & returned to a
workgroup server.
The other two handsets seem to be better suited to the cool feature
of enabling cheap/free VoIP calls mentioned in this article.
(I seem to recall hearing mention of an auto-roaming WiFi-based
VoIP handset, eg, on Systm's Asterisk video. 'dunno if one of
these Nokia handsets would work like that. These cool Nokia
handsets aren't promoted in Australia, at least not by the
TelCo's, who'd lose high-profit revenues every time we used
the WiFi.)
Still lacking is a cost-free "walkie-talkie" function (not to be
confused with the current generation of "Push-to-Talk" handsets)
that would work when to phones are out of range of their base(s)
- eg, when camping in the Aussie Bush.
The only version of the trolltech phone that exists is wifi and bluetooth enabled...
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Perhaps you didnt know this, but the majority shareholder in telia sonera is the goverment of sweden.
;D
In soviet scandinavia lawmakers own the corporations.
Sounds like the Nokia e70 I've had for 2 months.
I thought Verizon would (with a little or a lot of trickery)- How else do people get imported Korean phones on Verizon (5-megapixel cameraphones are the phones of my dreams).
OSx86 FTW
I have had mine for about 8 months, in the good 'ol backwards USA. Works great, battery life is OK, I charge it in the sync cradle. Uses the same number on Wifi and cellular, and I have my landline phone forwarded. When this go gold, i am turning off the home phone.
There is in fact no built-in WiFi on the GreenPhone, although it has a SD card slot so an add-on card is a possibility. The linuxdevices article was corrected for that, and the discussion on /. also addressed it.
You dont know much about Nokia and Ericsson if you dont know that they earn substantial percentages of their incomes from supplying network infrastructure. Nokia supplies and manages networks for 180 service providers! They not only sell them networks, they make sure they work! This does not make the actual operators of course. To quote Wikipedia: "Nokia Networks provides mobile network infrastructure, communications and networks service platforms, as well as professional services to operators and service providers. Networks focuses in: GSM, EDGE and 3G/WCDMA networks; core networks with increasing IP and multiaccess capabilities; and services". The same goes for LM Ericsson.
:) Nokia has a similar product.
The SonyEricsson P990 Smartphone has Wifi and 3G (UMTS) in one package - Im waiting for mine right now