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Telecoms Announce "One Voice" Initiative To Promote LTE Wireless Broadband Stand

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the wars-fought-with-dollars dept.

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."

2 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Some large companies are missing by Xerfas · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:SMS on the Internet, efficiency issues. by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.