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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."
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.
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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.
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.
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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Voice is much more complicated than it seems. ...
You have to tax calls, manage pre-paid and post-paid plans. You need to have rules for roaming between operators and types of access, guarantee privacy, but also ensure the the authorities can listen and trace calls if ordered by a court of law. You have QOS, policy enforcement (ex: terminate calls if you have no $$), call forwarding,
And all this must be integrated to other existing operators seamlessly and without braking any existing features.
It is very complicated stuff.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
That all sounds like a bunch of work to prop up a business model that simply doesn't make sense anymore. Different billing for voice and data made sense when voice and data were legitimately different types of data, but here in the magical fantasy future year of 2009, a kilobyte of voice takes exactly the same effort to deliver as a kilobyte of data. Stop overcomplicating your business and just charge me by the fucking kilobyte already.
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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.
Not a daft question, but it's not a separate standard. SIP is the closest thing we have to a VoIP standard. IMS is the specification of how to fit SIP into a GSM network. There's a lot that SIP doesn't specify - e.g. authentication and authorisation (GSM networks need to use SIMs and the corresponding HLR/HSS back end databases), accounting and billing, gateways to circuit-switched voice etc.
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
Firstly, you need stuff to handle routing your call to those on other networks (PSTN, other mobile networks, GSM/UMTS/CDMA/etc).
Secondly you need stuff to handle hand-offs when you walk from the LTE coverage area to a GSM/CDMA/UMTS coverage area.
Also you need to be able to charge differently for voice and messaging (voice on mobile networks also has government taxes and charges that dont apply to data in various parts of the world)
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!"
a kilobyte of voice takes exactly the same effort to deliver as a kilobyte of data
Not true. If my voice packets have 200ms of jitter then the conversation will be unintelligible. If my YouTube video data (for example) has 200ms of jitter then I won't even notice.
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