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MagicJack Femtocell Gates Cell Traffic to VoIP
olsmeister writes "MagicJack is demonstrating a femtocell device at CES that will allow any GSM phone (locked or unlocked) to place free phone calls over the internet using VOIP. The device costs $40 and includes free service for 1 year. It supposedly will cover a 3,000 sq ft house."
So.... what does this mean?
~ Clueless
It is a scam. Consumer Reports said so.
I would love to have something like this that interfaces with Asterisk.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
There's no "trick" to work with locked phones. GSM has no network-side authentication, so all you have to do is impersonate your carrier's network (this is trivial). But I can't imagine this being in line with regulations. Another issue is that encryption does not work unless you're a carrier and share a secret with the phone's SIM, which means that invariably your calls will be broadcast in the clear when you're using this device.
I'm not entirely sure this is a good idea. Femtocells are great, but impersonating carriers gets you into all sorts of sticky issues.
Does the MJ actually work worth a darn? How is call quality?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I've had MajicJack for more than 6 months now, it's the best thing I have ever found for phone service. Yes it sucks at times when I'm downloading etc, then the quality suffers a little, but otherwise 20$ a year, ya, I bet anyone and everyone screaming "SCAM!" is a freakin phone service salesman... Phone companies and cell companies can't come anywhere near 20$ a year, not even skype, and I have noticed the quality IS better than skype... MajicJack == the end of the line for residential phone companies
The current MagicJack is a device about the size of a matchbox with a USB connection and a phone jack. The USB connector plugs into the user's computer, loads software onto it, and uses the computer's power, processor and broadband connection. The femtocell will also use the PC, but it will let users make calls with their cell phones instead of wired phones.
Why can't they make a standalone device!?
While I can see this working great for people out in the middle of nowhere that somehow have great internet and terrible cell service, I can't see this working for the average person to make free calls. For one, this solution would eliminate any encryption meaning your calls are able to be intercepted with ease, another is, I'm not entirely sure that Magic Jack would encrypt your calls going over the internet leading to possible interception there, and then if it was broadcast through another femtocell it could be intercepted through there again. In short, it may be a way for people to save a few bucks, but at the cost of any privacy.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
my dad uses this too and would agree that it is the shit. 20$/yr is nothing. That being said, why does anyone still want a land line? Being able to reduce my cell minutes because of this device would be MONEY!
You know, T-Mobile, a few years back, introduced UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) with some of their phones (which T-Mo has subsequently marketted under 3 different names, you know, to confuse their customers, I guess), but none of the other carriers picked up on it, and T-Mo pretty quickly abandoned it - I believe their network still supports it, and some/all of their Blackberries support it, but they pretty quickly stopped advertising it, none of the Android phones support it, and T-Mo has quietly gotten rid of every non-Blackberry phone that used to have the UMA feature.
It's really kind of a shame - UMA is a great idea: basically, any WiFi hotspot that you can connect to become a "cell tower" (well, it routes cell phone traffic over a tunnel on the Internet, to T-Mo's network, so it basically becomes VoIP). This Femtocell idea is something that some of the other carriers are sort of testing (I have some relatives on Sprint who got one because there is very poor reception at their house). But, I think UMA is a superior solution to these femtocells, because a) with UMA, you need a phone with UMA support, but you had to get a phone anyway, so adding UMA to phones would have been almost 'free' from the customer perspective, with the only other equipment needed being something you *probably* already have, and if you don't, you can get dirt cheap at Microcenter, Best Buy, Fry's, etc., and B) the femtocell will *only* work at your own location where you put it, whereas UMA would work with any Internet connection and most Wifi hotspots, which means that I could take advantage of it at other locations if they have WiFi (relatives or friends houses, school, work, shopping, etc) too.
Now, I think with the Android phones, you can now do some VoIP calling, but the advantage with UMA was that calls would seamlessly transfer between wifi and the cell network (if you left Wifi range, or entered Wifi range). It's really a damn shame that the cell phone industry didn't adopt UMA as a feature, because to me, it seems like a vastly superior approach than femtocells.
I suppose it's theoretically possible that UMA could rise from the ashes, but at this point, it seems kinda dead. More's the pity.
Some interference occurred when the tester tried talking while downloading a large file or playing an online game. If you can live with that, we think the Magic Jack is a great deal.
Something that could easily be overcome with a router that has decent QoS capabilities. Overall, it seems like a decent deal.
and now I can call all my friends for free.
And then I realized, I have no friends.
FOR SALE MAGIC JACK, used twice. $1
I've been getting offers for one of these from AT&T. If I remember correctly, they want $100 for the cell plus $19.99 a month for the service. You also need a broadband connection.
Welcome to 1980.
When it takes only slightly more tech-fu to get a real SIP based setup working. However, if they are actually planning on selling a $40 USB peripheral than functions as a GSM femtocell, I am interested. Very Interested.
Reverse engineering the sucker, and getting a Free driver built would be a hell of a boon to small scale asterisk setups and similar. Most devices running asterisk or other software PBXs have at least one USB port, and being able to set up your own asterisk integrated femtocell would be awesome(either to let you take advantage of a lower priced/fewer minutes plan by doing all your home calling over a cheap SIP trunk or simply to take advantage of the fact that used and/or low-end GSM handsets are substantially cheaper than decent Wi Fi based SIP handsets are).
I don't assume that they would approve(and I can't imagine that team traditional telco would be too happy either) but if MagicJack is actually planning to make femtocells as cheap as USB wifi dongles, they get a gold star from me.
Why is this called a femto cell? The area covered is much more than 10^-15 of that of a standard cell tower. If this device covers a radius of 50 ft, and a tower works to a radius of about mile, then the fractional area covered is 10^-4, or somewhere between a microcell and a millicell.
Now only if I could plant one in the movie theater... think of the possibilities!
Hundreds of dollars hard. Maybe $100 when mass-produced.
Besides which, if it was standalone then they'd lose their advertising revenue. For me, the ads in software on my machine are a complete turnoff. For that, I've never installed it.
SIG: HUP
That being said, why does anyone still want a land line?
A) Some people don't get Cell Reception (or it costs more than the land line)
B) A few of us live in places where the cell phones have gone down after mother nature had a fit, but the land lines were still working perfectly.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Lot's of people figure you can't negotiate with a cell or cable company, but that might not be true. I have relatives who use Sprint. They've been using Sprint for a few years, and had upgraded to a more premium voice & data package for 2 phones. They were generally happy with Sprint, but the coverage at their house was crappy. They talked to Sprint about this, basically told them they weren't going to pay additional monthly fees on top of the premium package fees they were already paying, but were unhappy with reception at their house, and were able to get Sprint to sell them the femtocell device at a slight discount and wave all monthly fees.
I don't know if AT&T will negotiate, but sometimes with things like this (which are basically add-ons), cell companies *want* to charge if they think they can get away with it, but if you tell them you won't pay and *additional* $10-20/mo on top of normal cell service fees and Internet access fees, just to get service, they might back down.
My house is 3 feet wide and 1000 ft long. Am I covered, smart guy?
One of the weird things I've run into in doing 3rd-party tech support is that houses can, indeed, have Faraday cages.
If the house is of the right vintage (mostly pre-1950's) it may have plaster walls. One method of hanging plaster is to put up a metal mesh lath which can make a very effective Faraday cage out of each of the rooms.
A modern variation on the builtin Faraday cage is rigid foam insulation that is covered on one or both sides with a metal reflective coating, often used in external wall insulation.
When a new customer calls and says they are having trouble getting wireless to work in their house, one of my first questions is does it have plaster walls.
You made me think of something...
If I was ATT or Verizon or T-Mobil I would want everyone to own one of these things.
The reason being is that on my cell phone (I have the unlimited plan so I gave up ye olde land line years ago) 90% of my calls are made from home. I suspect my usage probably mirrors a lot of other users. (maybe a different pattern for teens running to friends all the time and what not but they like texting anyway so thats almost no bandwidth used)
They would save huge amounts of wireless bandwidth and put the burden on the broad band land lines.
Better yet they could keep charging the same amount of money for a lot less service.
Just one of my random probably insane thoughts but thats the way I roll lol
my cell doesn't work at my cabin, which has dsl (natch). this would be perfect.
I can just as easily make a call over WLAN. And most, if not all smartphones do WLAN already. Just install the software, if your phone doesn’t already have it build-in (as mine does).
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
gmail has no privacy yet 10s of thousands use it everyday, for blab and communique. what's this privacy problem now ?
Ooma has much better call quality and reliability, although it cost $200 upfront. After that you pay $12/year regulatory fee for basic features, which include free long distance within US, Caller Id, Voice mail etc. Premium features are $10/month extra.
According to this http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5iVJAWp2WTjEYUHNGV8v2KY3JxlVQ/
And if you come within 2.4 meters of the device, your cell is supposed to register with it automagically.
If the carriers let this fly, nano cells in licensed band are next and they'll never let this happen.
Can someone help? I'm having trouble finding the verb in the story title.
I'd say buy it quick before it's gone, but given it hooks to a service there is really no point. There's a commentary on the viability of the service model that everyone seems to be running toward there.
Mod me off-topic if you need to, but this title is why I my relationship with the English language is still slightly iffy.
MagicJack Femtocell Gates Cell Traffic to VoIP
So let's see, proper noun, noun, noun, noun, preposition, noun. Where's the verb? Who's trafficking cells through the gates here? Or wait, the cell traffic of the femtocell gates is to ... no, wait. With all the noun-as-adjective and ambiguous noun-or-verb words, your natural parser screws up---assuming your natural parser (like mine) is greedy and wants to impose structure as early and often as possible.
Would it really be that awful to say "MagicJack femtocell gating cell traffic to voip"? Then you need a smaller token (i.e. word) lookahead before you can reduce "MagicJack femtocell" into subject, "gating" into verb, "cell traffic" to object, etc. (or at least, you will sooner make guesses which later turn out to be correct, and so you won't have to backtrack).
I ar dum. Editor buffalo smurf easier to marklar and understand. Plies.
The TOS for MJ is one of the worst I have ever seen; they could write malware and get protected by the TOS you must agree to. Most people don't read it... At 1st I wondered if they were going 2 make their money by spying on me. (lotta luck I did all I could to sandbox it and later ran it in a VM... now I moved to a TK6000)
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You can't QoS the magicjack. it uses a HUGE range of ports making the QoS only useful if you don't do something else in that wide UDP range they use. It only initiates with a predictable port the proxy gets it going in some random range after that. Unless you have a fancy router that can figure it out somehow (by destination) you basically are taking the upper range of UDP to a higher priority. The software doesn't let you pick the connection; otherwise you could stick it on a second network port and handle it that way (which I've done.)
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For a response from someone who actually knows something about the subject, see Harold Welte's blog
According to their FAQ it uses 2 ports
magicJack uses port 5060 and 5070 UDP.
http://service.liveperson.net/hc/s-61732089/cmd/kbresource/kb-137415081868036450/view_question!PAGETYPE?sc=13&sf=101133&documentid=345562&action=view
Does anybody know anybody who has one? They don't exactly have to be members of the Better Business Bureau.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
I know the AT&T femtocells have a GPS chip built into them to prevent their use overseas. Can this device be used in another country? I would love to carry one of these with me when I travel to avoid international roaming fees.
I saw the traffic. it initially uses those ports but afterwards it sets up the actual "connection" on a near random udp port in a huge range.
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Could this become a hazard similar to the fake "free wifi" adhoc networks set up in airports, etc to capture passwords, etc? It would seem that a hidden one of these could capture many phone calls; in an area with many businessmen, for example, this could be used by criminals.
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
Can someone help? I'm having trouble finding the verb in the story title.
The verb is "Gates".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Which operator will allow its devices to operate on this femtocell? I think it is illegal to use licensed frequencies.