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Telecoms Announce "One Voice" Initiative To Promote LTE Wireless Broadband Stand
suraj.sun writes to mention that Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks may have just gotten a boost over WiMax in the battle for wireless broadband dominance. A group of telecom companies has created the "One Voice" initiative, designed to promote a standard that will provide interoperability for broadband voice and SMS. "LTE has been fine at supporting data, which uses IP-based packet switching. But it's faced challenges trying to incorporate traditional circuit-based switching voice and SMS services onto IP-based networks. One Voice is the group's attempt to resolve that issue. The new specification will use existing functionality known as IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which already defines how to provide data, voice, and other content over an IP-based network. IMS was established by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a group comprised of telecom industry associations trying to set standards for 3G mobile networks."
So they've come up with a new, clever way to prioritize traffic, so that packety networks appear circuity?
yawn
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Would be nice if Huawei and ZTE also got into One Voice. Sprint, Clearwire and T-mobile has chosen other technologies where Sprint and Clearwire goes for Wimax and wont go for LTE and T-mobile goes for VoLGA, Voice over LTE via Generic Access. I think it would be better if those companies joined in on LTE in One Voice. But that's just my opinion. Just more logical to have one standard then several for the sake of the customers and ofcourse the mobile manufacturers.
Hard to see how SMS is not compatible with packet switching. TFA just seems to say Voice and SMS everywhere as if they were the same thing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Congratulations on your purchase of a brand new nigger! If handled properly, your apeman will give years of valuable, if reluctant, service.
INSTALLING YOUR NIGGER.
You should install your nigger differently according to whether you have purchased the field or house model. Field niggers work best in a serial configuration, i.e. chained together. Chain your nigger to another nigger immediately after unpacking it, and don't even think about taking that chain off, ever. Many niggers start singing as soon as you put a chain on them. This habit can usually be thrashed out of them if nipped in the bud. House niggers work best as standalone units, but should be hobbled or hamstrung to prevent attempts at escape. At this stage, your nigger can also be given a name. Most owners use the same names over and over, since niggers become confused by too much data. Rufus, Rastus, Remus, Toby, Carslisle, Carlton, Hey-You!-Yes-you!, Yeller, Blackstar, and Sambo are all effective names for your new buck nigger. If your nigger is a ho, it should be called Latrelle, L'Tanya, or Jemima. Some owners call their nigger hoes Latrine for a joke. Pearl, Blossom, and Ivory are also righteous names for nigger hoes. These names go straight over your nigger's head, by the way.
CONFIGURING YOUR NIGGER
Owing to a design error, your nigger comes equipped with a tongue and vocal chords. Most niggers can master only a few basic human phrases with this apparatus - "muh dick" being the most popular. However, others make barking, yelping, yapping noises and appear to be in some pain, so you should probably call a vet and have him remove your nigger's tongue. Once de-tongued your nigger will be a lot happier - at least, you won't hear it complaining anywhere near as much. Niggers have nothing interesting to say, anyway. Many owners also castrate their niggers for health reasons (yours, mine, and that of women, not the nigger's). This is strongly recommended, and frankly, it's a mystery why this is not done on the boat
HOUSING YOUR NIGGER.
Your nigger can be accommodated in cages with stout iron bars. Make sure, however, that the bars are wide enough to push pieces of nigger food through. The rule of thumb is, four niggers per square yard of cage. So a fifteen foot by thirty foot nigger cage can accommodate two hundred niggers. You can site a nigger cage anywhere, even on soft ground. Don't worry about your nigger fashioning makeshift shovels out of odd pieces of wood and digging an escape tunnel under the bars of the cage. Niggers never invented the shovel before and they're not about to now. In any case, your nigger is certainly too lazy to attempt escape. As long as the free food holds out, your nigger is living better than it did in Africa, so it will stay put. Buck niggers and hoe niggers can be safely accommodated in the same cage, as bucks never attempt sex with black hoes.
FEEDING YOUR NIGGER.
Your Nigger likes fried chicken, corn bread, and watermelon. You should therefore give it none of these things because its lazy ass almost certainly doesn't deserve it. Instead, feed it on porridge with salt, and creek water. Your nigger will supplement its diet with whatever it finds in the fields, other niggers, etc. Experienced nigger owners sometimes push watermelon slices through the bars of the nigger cage at the end of the day as a treat, but only if all niggers have worked well and nothing has been stolen that day. Mike of the Old Ranch Plantation reports that this last one is a killer, since all niggers steal something almost every single day of their lives. He reports he doesn't have to spend much on free watermelon for his niggers as a result. You should never allow your nigger meal breaks while at work, since if it stops work for more than ten minutes it will need to be retrained. You would be surprised how long it takes to teach a nigger to pick cotton. You really would. Coffee beans? Don't ask. You have no idea.
MAKING YOUR NIGGER WORK.
Niggers are very, very averse to work of any kind. The nigger's most
The telecoms have caught on to IP? And the handset manufacturers are committing to a standard DC adaptor? ...I thought we'd be walking on Mars before this day. We probably would, too, if it weren't for these masterminds with their business imperatives (Must... not... cooperate! Waste is profit!).
Well, they have to keep up the whole SMS racket. If each SMS message went through as one IP packet, how could they charge $0.20 each?
Putting SMS on the Internet can be botched. though. Google just did it. Google Voice supports SMS send and receive. Google's site can be queried for SMS in XML and JSON. There's a Python library for this. All this works. But Google's returned XML has so much useless dreck in it that each poll returns about 100K of data, even if there's no new SMS traffic. Thus, if you poll every 30 seconds and get no new messages, you use a quarter of a gigabyte a day of bandwidth just polling. So don't do that in an iPhone app to save on SMS charges.
Google needs to put Google Voice on something like RSS, where there's a way to cheaply poll to find out if anything changed. When polling RSS, you send back the ID from the previous poll reply. If you get a 304 status and no data, nothing changed. It would also help if they got the RSS implementation right. Some RSS servers return a new unique ID every time, even when nothing changed. (Twitter, I'm looking at you here.)
There are thus some widely used services which waste vast amounts of bandwidth trying to do by pull and poll what can be cheaply done by push.
Excuse my ignorance, but why not send voice over IP? Why the need for a separate voice standard?
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
And if you poll, you'll consume so much battery that the iPhone won't make it through a working day. Seriously. In any mobile application (be it iPhone, Android, WebOS or other), you should not poll, and definitely not every 30 seconds, because you'll eat up battery in no time - the CPU and radios just suck power when you do. It's why Apple has the whole push notification deal - getting notified is far better on the battery than polling.
If GV requires this for SMS, then you as app developer should setup a notification server and do the polling there.
And SMS does require special handling since the target may not be awake when you need to push it out. You can't just send it to the phone, you have to send a wakeup to the phone first then send the packet out. In regular GSM, the control channel is what notifies the radio, and the radio handles all the SMS transfer. In IP based network, it may be pushed off onto the main processor to use its IP stack.
First we have GSM: made for voice, pefect for voice.
Then HSPA come. And VoIP over HSPA: HSPA is not good enough. So HSPA+ is tried, not good enough for voice.
So we need LTE to deliver voice over IP for IMS in order to have what GSM already provides.
you can. No, 40,000 3orkstations may do, maye not it there. Bring baby...don't fear please moderate
WiMax was in the works for too long. Besides that, after the millions spent on UMTS licenses here in Europe, no operator was willing to adopt it.
It seems that LTE (4G) is going to fit very well in the core GSM(2G)/UMTS(3G) infrastructure and there's already some fuzz about it.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
When I was in Japan back around 2003, SMS had been completely replaced by email there. All phones supported email, and when you received an email the phone woke up. If you've got an IP network, it's pretty easy to just use an existing protocol, like XMPP or email to deliver messages. There are existing email to SMS gateways, so this seems like an obvious way of doing it. Only support email on your LTE phones and have the carrier run a gateway that turns SMS received for the phone into email and emails addressed to {phone number}@carrier.com into SMS for legacy networks and maybe add something to the phone's UI that lets it pretend to still be sending SMS and fills in the @carrier.com bit of the email address for you.
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And if you poll, you'll consume so much battery that the iPhone won't make it through a working day....And SMS does require special handling since the target may not be awake when you need to push it out.
So this stuff isn't really my area of expertise, but insofar as the problem is in the polling/pushing over IP, doesn't it make sense to come up with a generalized solution that can be used freely for things other than SMS? There are lots of things that people want some kind of "push" technology for, including emails, IM, social networking updates, and even file changes. Doesn't it make sense to just make a standard for pushing whatever data needs to be pushed rather than coming up with something special for voice and SMS?
SIP provides the control part of the stream as well as messaging (think SMS or IM). RTP is used along side SIP for media. That media can be voice or video. Throw in some QoS so that the data that is along side the SIP and RTP media doesn't overwhelm the pipe and you have a workable, scalable solution based on open standards. No need to come up with a brand new protocol when one already exists and is in use on IP networks around the world.
Nothing is impossible. It just hasn't been figured out yet.
It's called SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). The idea there is that you've got an address (like a phone number, but more generic), and anyone can use the SIP gateway to push content to you. Can be used for email, VOIP, whatever. The SIP gateway stands between public internet and your wireless network, more or less. I can't remember exactly as it's been a few years since I read up...help anybody?
Wait wait wait...
Why are we talking polling with regard to the iPhone?
Iphone and android have push notifications. (Basically sleeping tCP/IP connections similar to Microsoft Active Sync.
You have a TCP connection is opened to the server, and if there is nothing to send the server just doesn't send anything, and the phone shuts down its transmitters.
In 12 to 18 minutes, if no traffic occures the connection times out and drops, the socket becomes readable to the phone, the phone wakes up and creates a new connection and goes back to sleep.
If the server has something to send it puts it on the TCP connection, the socket becomes readable to the phone, it wakes up and does what is necessary.
No polling, unless you count a brief arousal from its slumber once every 15 minutes or so to reestablish a socket as polling.
This technique is used for lots of things on the net such as imap idled an of course MS Active Sync with an exchange server. Its non-patentable, and Apple supplies the notification service for any application that cares to use it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
LTE and WiMAX are the main competing 4G technologies. Both LTE and WiMAX are all-IP networks. No circuits. No dedicated channels for voice. If you run voice on 4G it will be packet voice no matter the other technology choices.
One Voice is what this consortium is calling IMS for 4G. IMS uses SIP for signaling. That makes IMS more like the kind of packet voice you find in Asterisk. Except IMS includes a lot of additional standards that, among other things, enables it to replace the signaling used in circuit switched networks and still interface to those networks. Some people favor IMS because it is the officially accepted 3GPP standard for these types of networks. Other people don't like IMS because it is too complicated and includes a lot of stuff that is unlikely to be used, including stuff like using SIP to initiate Web sessions so you can charge for them. Not that anyone would accept that kind of product.
The other consortium that pushing a voice call standard for LTE is called VoLGaA Forum. VoLGA stands for "Voice over LTE General Access." It works like UMA, which is a way of extending the circuit switched mobile signaling over IP. So you can buy these UMA "femtocells" - a really small cell site - and put them in your home or office and hook them up to your Internet service to extend mobile access to those locations. VoLGA is UMA scaled up to the whole network. Pretty suave, especially for the networks that already support UMA - you can re-use a lot of the same systems.
WiMAX never flirted with UMA (as far as I know) and I think most WiMAX networks that support voice will use IMS. Which is what One Voice is promoting for LTE. So that's no disadvantage for WiMAX.
You may be thinking "If it's all packet voice, why don't I put a SIP client on my smartphone and use my company's IP PBX? Or, why don't I use a smartphone Skype app?" That's called an over-the-top service (OTT). Which is why SMS is so... "important" to this discussion: The only thing you lose by using an OTT service, is SMS.
I wrote parts of this stuff
That's because the SMS system there was (is?) so broken that people had to use email.
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
Meh. Just let GV send your SMS to you via email, then you can get them in email and not need any special "SMS" support in the network.
Doesn't it make sense to just make a standard for pushing whatever data needs to be pushed
It's amazing how we can be in 2009, talking about a system being built on top of IP, and the idea of "push" seems advanced. Give the phone a routable IPv6 address, using an extra layer of tunneling for mobile IPv6 if necessary. Every incoming IP packet is a potential "push", and the phone should have TCP listeners for allowing asynchronously initiated application connections from the outside. Apply some sensible firewall rules and TLS security, and you are most of the way there.
By now, we should be talking about real advanced things, like a device that can delegate network policies into the network to help it manage its power budget, e.g. tell the network what your firewall goals are and even your QoS goals, so it can filter and queue traffic for you and avoid waking your radio with traffic you will just drop. All of these could be done as management protocols to modify TCP/IP connectivity "out of band" rather than some new abomination. A phone is a computer is a router.
A simple solution: use a dedicated server (say $30-per-month VPS) to work as an adapter for their clumsy protocols.
I was just using the iPhone as an example. I just need an API that accesses Google Voice for SMS. "pygooglevoice" has the right functionality, but once I got it working, I realized that underneath, the efficiency is awful.
Eventually Google's developers will figure this out, and either block programmable clients or add an API. Google inherited this thing from Grand Central, which never had that many users, and it needs some rework for scaleup.
Several commercial SMS gateways deliver SMS messages to web sites by making an HTTP request of the customer's web site. That's a form of "push". RSS polling wouldn't be expensive to support if done right. "No traffic" polls are cheap, especially if the information that user N has no new traffic is in RAM.