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Ask Slashdot: Data-Only Phone, Voice Over WiFi?
enFi writes "I want to pay one ISP (only!) for data (only!), and use it for my smartphone and my computer; and until they catch up, I want not to inconvenience the rest of the world — still let them call a phone number. (We all want this, right?) I'm most of the way there: my plan is to get a Clear Spot (their 4G WiMAX coverage is good for me) to use with my unlocked Nexus S (which will only ever use WiFi). I could just use Skype and an Online Number, but talk of Sipdroid+pbxes.org+GV and the recent Google Voice / SIP article make me think I'm only starting to untangle the mess of services and options. Is there a good (not to mention best) way to do this?"
Sorry, I don't see this solution out there, and ISPs will do their darnedest to prevent it from happening. They make a a pretty penny on
My set-up is my N900 using UMTS (or WiFi if I'm at home) connecting to my Asterisk box which handles call routing and voicemail, and which connects to the plain-old-telephone-system via Vitelity. Alternatively, you could skip running your own Asterisk server and just connect to Vitelity directly (or run Asterisk on the N900).
I believe Android's Gingerbread release also supports SIP, but I don't have direct experience with that. Either way, I use SIP over 3G and WiFi quite a bit since it's significantly cheaper than when I'm on the mobile voice network.
Never trust anyone over 90000.
Sprint Relay data only plan?
VPS Hosting http://serveraxis.com/
Either of those companys can port-in your old cell phone number. You can answer that incoming call on skype.
The only downside I see to what you want to do, apart from the fact that you'll have to carry two devices, is that Clear's website shows the battery life of the Clear Spot 4G to be only 4 hours - and usually these advertised figures are optimistic. Do you have a way around that, other than carrying a third device, namely a battery?
Putting moderation advice in your
VoIP over mobile networks is nowhere close to being reliable. Yes, it works if you're lucky enough but expect horrible jitter due to bufferbloat, inability to call sometimes because data network is congested, big lags, problems with filtering, etc.
We've tried it for secure voice communication. It JustDoesntWork(tm).
Check out VirginMobile's Data Plans.
$25, prepaid, for 300 minutes and 'unlimited data'.
The LG Optimus V is on-sale right now at Target for $130 + $20 Gift Card. Plus, you can get cheap rates on the refills:
Save an extra 5% with your RedCard. I like to buy my Top Up Cards with my RedCard at Target, since I get 5% off. The best deal is getting the $20 RECHARGEABLE Top-Up card from Target. For every 5 charges, you get $10 free. Plus 5% off with the RedCard.
I have a VoIP service contract which provides me with one or more landline numbers (free incoming calls) that route to my SIP client via Wifi or GPRS. Outgoing calls are prepaid to the same VoIP provider and are shown on caller-ID as coming from one of the landlines. Missed calls are taken as messages and e-mailed to me as .WAV's. SIP to SIP calls are free.
Scout around for a VoIP provider. I use VoipTalk and never had a problem.
I bought an ooma device, which allows me to hook up my phones to the internet over a VoiP connection and provides a telephone number with free domestic calls. There's a non-trivial up front cost ($120-$200), and a very modest monthly fee to cover taxes (~$3.50/mo). So far, it's been really easy, and I have no complaints.
I can get data only service from my provider (Frontier, was Verizon), though they don't seem to be able to bill me properly...
I have used sipgate on a Verizon Droid for a long time while I was in the U.S.. Way better call quality than what you get out of a regular wireless service.
Plus, they offer free phone numbers along with unlimited inbound calls. In my case I used one of their European phone numbers and got myself a free European phone service with no roaming charges. Nice.
You might get yourself a freebie setup that way and be reachable on a phone number for the rest of the world. Calling out you can use Skype etc. or just top-up your prepaid account with sipgate.
I am a cross border commuter, and I needed a phone with a data-plan for ~ 12 days in a month. What many people don't know, is that sim cards with prepaid data for usb modems, will also work on a phone and you can even receive calls (making phone calls is very expensive) . You can then install skype to make cheap phone calls. In my case I have trouble with skype but, I think the CPU/RAM is the bottleneck.
In an open network, neutral world, he's not trying to 'game the system'. Yes, the FCC says that net neutrality isn't required on mobile data networks serviced by carriers (a huge travesty), but he's trying to do an isochronous application. If there's toll avoidance, SO MUCH THE BETTER.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Sprint has 3G MiFi cover for iPod Touch 79.99 plus 29.99/mo no contract plan. Get Skype and you are free...
Use skype on an iPod 4. I know some people who do that and it works great. The form factor is just like an iPhone.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Menu->Settings->Call Settings->Internet Call Settings.
Just get a SIP provider and Android will use it as if it's a cell network, I assume. I'm not sure how the quality will be over a mobile network, but I'd be curious to hear how it works out for you.
i actually did something similar to this for about a year and it worked very well. I had a sprint Razr V3M that i used for data and VOIP with Vonage and it worked reasonably well all of the time. I used the cheapest Vonage box i could find, my old landline phone and my wrt54g/ddwrt router. in order to get internet to the router to be shared with the vonage box i turned on internet connection sharing on the computer and plugged it into the router "internet" input. after that i had shared wifi and LAN internet. Vonage used about 75kbps and EVDO top out about 125kbps in my area. and keep in mind, this was FOUR YEARS AGO!!!
Now keep in mind, this was EVDO, and at the time there wasnt much faster then that, and if there was other stuff going on over the internet then i would have the voice quality degrade to (or most likely have no sound at all, but my calls still did complete). never had latency/lag issues either. and yeah, i was still paying for data through Sprint and Voice through Vonage, but the savings were about $50 a month as i always went over on my available airtime, for unlimited voice voice and unlimited data ($40 a month to sprint and $25 to vonage versus $90+ a month for unlimited data through sprint and limited voice through sprint.
What you are proposing isnt really a terrible idea, and so long as WiMax stays neutral to services, it should work great!
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
There's a reason wires are king and that is bandwidth. Wireless bandwidth will never match wired. There are all sorts of problems, signal to noise, more narrow bands, but all that aside there is the problem of contention. Everyone in a given area, using a given bandwidth has to share it. That is just how things work. With a wired connection, each person can have their own dedicated connection. There are wired systems that share, like cable modems and PON, but the level to which they share is highly controllable.
You'll find that all those numbers they claim on wireless are only if you've got a segment to yourself. If you and only you are playing around, then you get good bandwidth. When other people start using it, your rate drops because you have to share time slices.
Of course all the towers have wires running to them, so it isn't like any of the problems there are gone. It is just "last mile" that is wireless.
So take any problems you've ever had with a wired ISP, and then add in a whole new set of problems, not the least of which being much lower bandwidth.
You want to wire in when feasible. That is just how things go. When you are talking a desktop, it should be wired the whole way. A laptop, wireless to an access point, wired to the net. Only when you are really on the go do you fall back to cellular data, because there's no other option.
As a practical example: My cable modem delivers about 80-100mbits to my house, depending on usage on my segment. My wired network can deliver all that and more to my desktop (gigabit ehternet). My wireless to my laptop can only deliver 20ish-mbits to my laptop, because that's all the more effective throughput you get with the standard it is using. Only get that if my laptop is the only one using it, if more than one uses it, it drops. My EVDO cellphone gets a few hundred kbits normally, though it is highly dependent on time of day and location.
You can see why there's a cable modem in my house, and a wire to my computer. Even if there were no caps on my phones data plan, I wouldn't want to use it.
I have recently 'retired' a Nokia E71. I simply wish to use it as a skype phone (app installed). It keeps complaining about 'SIM card registration failed' but skype over WiFi seems (a bit laggy at times) to work fine. If I could get rid of the SIM complaints, I would be happy to live with the (understandable) WiFi lag.
C:\>
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a thumb.
not entirely related... but my local telco just announced their first "4g" phone... with download speeds of 21Mbps, the largest data plan available on their service is 5GB/month meaning you can burn through your entire monthly allotment in half an hour, after which you go in to overage fees, you can spend over a thousand dollars in the next hour to get to the maximum allowed overage of 10GB/month at which point you get cut off.
If you're bragging about fast download speeds... don't you think you should re-think a monthly data cap that can be exceeded in half an hour? (and that's the BIGGEST plan they offer!)
A few months ago, I decided to ditch my landline and move as many calls as I could to my iPhone via SIP. Here's how I did it:
***My Equipment***
The Incredible PBX (I-PBX) runs within VMware and is pre-configured to support free VoIP calls anywhere in the US over Google Voice. The Google Voice service gives me a local phone number (DID), and will route calls to my home-based I-PBX over GTalk. Siphon on the iPhone gives me both in and outbound SIP calling while I'm on WiFi at home. At home, I also have a Cisco VoIP phone I got a few years ago which also handles inbound and outbound calls. When I'm away from home, I can make outbound calls whenever there's a WiFi network available by routing the calls over a VPN connection back to the Macmini server.
Note that there were a couple of caveats with my setup. The biggest problem is that inbound calls via Google Voice and GTalk don't seem to work reliably; the phones ring, but the voice connection never seems to work. I tend to think the problem is in my configuration though, and if I spent a bit more time troubleshooting the issue, I'm sure I could solve the problem. However, I can still use Google Voice to forward inbound calls back to the iPhone phone via the cellular network. I can then get the call, figure out who it is and how long it will take and, if it's going be be more than a couple of minutes, I can call back via VoIP.
I suppose I might just be an antisocial cellphone-Luddite (I don't have or want one), but what's the point of going through all this trouble to dodge minutes charges if you're going to have to pay for data rates instead? It's not like you'll get better service.
One could make a case for overly stereotypical pubescent girls, but are real people actually on the phone so much that there's a net gain?
pbxes.org is just not reliable enough. In my experience it goes down at least once a month. It's also highly technical and at some point you just want to stop worrying about the technical details and make and receive calls without hassles. You might as well run asterisk on your own server or on a VPS. Also, Google Voice, while having a fantastic interface and good reliability, introduces an often unacceptable latency into phone conversations. My co-workers and I have tried paid alternatives to GV, such as phone.com. The latency issue is similar, though voice quality and consistency is somewhat better. My own solution, for now, is to use AT&T on my phone when I'm roaming about the world and use Callcentric (callcentric.com) for VOIP service if AT&T coverage is weak and I have WI-FI available (e.g. in my home office). The disadvantage is, of course, that you have multiple phone numbers and it's sometimes confusing for people who are used to you calling from one number. I still use GV for voicemail but not for calling (programmed AT&T to forward voicemail to my google number). This is not a simple approach and it's not what you're looking for but it's what works right now. VOIP on cell phones (and in general, really) is still not mature enough so that it's always easy for any device to work perfectly with any service. I have a few software VOIP clients on my phone. I prefer Acrobits Softphone and Bria Softphone apps on my iPhone. I also have Skype. It's annoying enough for me to avoid it most of the time. Having run my phone on both AT&T and on TMobile's networks, I can tell you that it's not that feasible to do VOIP over GSM with either carrier on the iPhone. It may be feasible with Sprint/Clearwire and a different phone, but I'm not that interested in trying. My suggestion, if you're going to do 4G wireless is to just use a VOIP carrier like Callcentric with your data plan. However, I have doubts that the latency and reliability will be adequate. Good luck.
By the way, I came to this conclusion by starting out with an iPod touch and VOIP software, moving to a 3GS with VOIP software (hacked to use the iPad data plan ($15/mo)). Eventually settling on the current iPhone 4 + pretty cheap VOIP (less than $5/mo). Yes I could go Android but I don't like the phones. Yes I could go Verizon but I want voice+data at the same time. Yes I could go Sprint but their service isn't really superior to AT&T in my area and, for me, the jailbroken iPhone beats the EVO (although it's the best Android phone for my money).
not quite what you're looking for, but in the same vein. i'm using the nexus s on t-mobile prepaid with a google voice number
at my desktop: gmail voice chat over a 1Mbps, $10/month dsl connection
mobile with wifi: sip on the nexus s
mobile without wifi: t-mobile prepaid
everybody sees the same (gv) number. for sip i use callcentric + ipkall incoming, and anveo ($0.012 per minute) for outgoing. i'm using csipsimple instead of the builtin sip stack. i haven't tried sip over 3g. call quality with sip has been inconsistent, but i think i can improve it - i still need to tweak the echo cancellation params and figure out how to enable QOS on my router. i should also try skype-out
not a slam dunk, but calls are very cheap or free, sms is free - i spent $3 in the last month. when i need data it's $1.50 per day. it works because i'm at a computer most of the day, have wifi available most places i go, and don't make a ton of calls to begin with. at the price, it's hard to beat
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You can actually kinda get that, by buying your own micro cell. You hook it in to your network and then any cellphone on the network for the cell will switch to it when they get in its range. It is short range, of course, a house or less in size. It is a way to boost signal in weak areas and so on. Works fairly well, but is expensive and the phone companies tend to be more than a little incompetent at getting them set up.
Straight out "roam to WiFi" would be cool. Only problem is WiFi is rather chatty compared to GSM/CDMA so it'd reduce your battery life a non-trivial amount.
1) Get a data-only SIM. Here in Canada, $35/mth gets you 5GB for a data-only SIM. In that case it's a Virgin Mobile (which is wholly owned by Bell) android tablet SIM, but there's no reason it couldn't go in an android phone instead.
2) Get an Android phone supporting 2.3 or later
3) Get an account and DID at voip.ms (no PBX required, their customer management portal can do most things Asterix can). I assume you're in the US, so that's $0.99 USD per month for the DID, $0.01 per minute incoming minutes (by 6 second increments), and $0.0105 per minute outgoing (by 6 second inc
4) Either use Android 2.3's built-in SIP support, a third-party SIP application, or some combination of the two.
Excepting that the latency on HSPA+ isn't great (130-150ms on a decent connection), it should feel pretty close to native. I regularly make Skype calls on 3G, and while it's not optimal, it works well enough.
However, if I were you, I would wait until I could get an LTE Android phone before trying this; some googling showed benchmarks of 20 to 50 milliseconds on LTE, which is a huge improvement, and more than sufficient for great VoIP quality.
Reread the whole question, please.
The statement: "... my plan is to get a Clear Spot (their 4G WiMAX coverage is good for me) to use with my unlocked Nexus S (which will only ever use WiFi)" kinda implies that data would still go over mobile network.
Actually, I'm trying to have both, and have them be the same thing. When I'm at home, the Spot (or other mobile ISP) would be my home internet connection; when I'm mobile, it would be mobile broadband, as well as voice (over WiFi to my phone). So it's very informative (if sad) to hear that VoIP over mobile is jittery – which matches some, but not all, of the few tests I've done.
Oh, you mean mobile network but not mobile phone network? My bad. Sorry.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
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Another reason to move to Canada, then.
Good to hear it has potential to work. My concern so far is mostly the missing incoming calls: I often turn on the phone (just testing in the house) and see that the WiFi has disconnected, despite apparent strong signal. (However, Line2's pricing seems more straightforward than Skype's, though Skype is what I initially looked at.)
Cost per month with iPhone (AT&T):
$40 for 450 minutes
$25 + $10/GB over for 2GB
$10 + 10/ea for 1000 text messages
Plus residential internet:
~$40
Cost per month with Ideal Plan:
$40 for unlimited data
If you have a wired internet connection and landline at the house, you could install a sip gateway on your landline so that incoming calls are routed into the asterisk PBX. You can register your handset through a local wlan when you come into range, so that inbound calls on the landline route to your cell phone.
For a long time I ran this way, with an asterisk-friendly third party voip provider for long distance support. I set asterisk up to route local calls and 800 calls out the landline (Which was usually clearer and had less echo) and send all others to my voip provider. I also set it up so that inbound calls from priority people were routed to my cell phone number if my cell phone sip device was not registered on the local wlan. This just took the call from the land line and dialed my cell phone number through voip. That way no one ever got to know my actual cell phone number.
If you have a static IP on the open internet, you can establish a sip connection to asterisk from anywhere you have a wireless network connection. YMMV, and that's a lot of crap to expose to the internet.
You avoid an awful lot of fuss if you can just make a data to data sip call, cutting the PSTN out of the loop completely. Most people aren't set up for this, but if you have just two or three people you talk to on a regular basis and they're willing to set up the software, that's all you have to do right there.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
YES! I want one!
It should have no screen, Big battery, a switch for turn wifi on-off.
Possible a keypad for dial a voice call.
Well, not totally data only as it uses both cellular and WiFi networks. But it has also bright side as it will ensure better quality calls than traditional VoIP. If for example latency goes too high when using WiFi, it will automatically handover to cellular network.
They provide SIP service, starting at per use only (about $3 if you dont use it) and up to full unlimited international. My old cellphone is now a sip line fwd'd to my work cell phone. That way if/when I have to change jobs, I still have my old # and can at least use it on my computers via sip clients.
With a wifi sip phone, you can input your SIP account info and anywhere you have internets via WiFi, you have fone. If you want, you could get a mifi + usb data card to do the wifi bits. I have a cradlepoint PHS300 (courtesy a Woot! BOC) that works awesome, just plug in my Blackberry and I dont have to deal with the crappy bbdesktop or Sprint software.
-tm
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I've tried out SIP on my hacked up phone running XDAndroid Gingerbread, and the call quality was terrible over SIP, even though I was on wifi. I had it setup using a Gizmo5 account (sad that they're being shutdown), and the call quality on Gizmo5 was fine over the exact same wifi connection from my computer.
I'm wonder if it's just because I'm running Android on a hacked up phone that was never designed to run it. Does anyone else have any experience with the call quality on SIP on Gingerbread?
The people in the Clear store said they didn't throttle per-service (I specifically asked about SIP/VoIP, and they also mentioned torrents), though I don't know if they're authoratative (or entirely knowledgeable; they misheard 'SIP phone' as ZipPhone at first). But yes, a detail that's important to check.
You must be BLIND...
I got Magic Jack. It's now my home "phone line". It's a little USB dongle that plugs into my Mac (which is on, anyway) and my my home telephone line, so all my normal phones work on the MJ. It replaces the phone company. To use my normal phones, I unscrewed the wires at the junction box so my internal wires weren't connected to the telco anymore.
$20/year, no hassles, unlimited calls, I can plug it into my computer at anyplace with a 'net connection and my phone # stays with it. Whatever bandwidth it uses has been below my threshold of noticability.
I don't work for MJ, just a happy customer.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
First, let's address the whole Clear-as-ISP issue. Unless you don't mind outages and hidden usage caps (read the forums on Clear.com, it's full of horror stories), Clear is absolutely impossible to use as a wired ISP replacement. Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh. If you're coming from AOL dial-up, it's an improvement in that you might actually be able to get a standard definition YouTube video to stream. If you watch NetFlix, expect to have plenty of bathroom and snack breaks inserted into your movies - courtesy of Clear. And finally, as a reward for all your patience, they'll cap your speeds back to the stone age. Oh, and when you finally get fed up with them and cancel, they'll either nail you with a termination fee, lose the modem/Clear Spot/etc. that you returned and you'll have plenty of of helpful, friendly conversations with their customer support attempting to get it all sorted out. Yes, I've tried Clear. Big mistake.
Second, the phone service. If you are in a position in your life where you never have to worry about an "important" phone call, I envy you. VoIP over cellular data plans is a novelty that works well enough to make an outgoing call, only if the bandwidth conditions are good enough where you happen to be at the moment. It's also worth noting that most cellular data connections begin to degrade heavily if you're in a moving vehicle - forget about a clear, distortion free call while you're in a car. If you want a phone that actually works as a phone, don't be a damn cheapskate and get an actual phone. Boost (which runs on Sprint's network) has unlimited everything for $50 (and the refills can usually be found for $47 online), Simple Mobile works with any T-Mobile phone and is $60 for unlimited everything and Straight Talk (which sells phones that use either AT&T or Verizon's networks) is $45 for unlimited everything.
So yes, you can go the Clear route, pay $45 a month, have crappy Internet access at home and a ghetto-rigged VoIP phone that is dead weight more-often-than-not - or - you can pay $45 to $60 for *real* unlimited cellular service and get a DSL or cable connection at home that won't suck. Your choice.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
yeah. do it. but do your homework on which you can configure for wifi sip, skype and such.
though, just leaving a sim in so that other people can call _you_ doesn't hurt that much. stupid operators in usa just seem to be in the habit of racking up minutes for receiving calls. that's no good, cellphone popularity goes way up if you don't need to count minutes when answering..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You're on Android? Did you set the WiFi Sleep Policy to "Never"? Default is to turn off (i.e. switch to mobile data) when the screen blanks... back in the early days of Android this made sense, because WiFi used to drain a ton of power when idle. Not true any longer, at least not since the Droid/N1 generation... idle drain is on par with or within 10-20% of 3G idle (figures from my Desire in standby are 4-5mA on 3G and 4-6mA on WiFi).
I think Android is better than SB
http://lyricsbus.net
Works like a charm when using wifi. Via 3G, openvpn makes sure, your provider won't know what hit them. Advantages: - Cheap - Your own PBX - Crypto as long as you're dialing inside your PBX - Enables you to use other VoIP-phones, too It has a few disadvantages though: - Eats right through your battery (esp. the wifi part) - Bad coverage ruins your calls - Needs root on your android for openvpn - Needs some server (for asterisk && openvpn) - Needs a bit know how to set up correctly (I'm doing lectures about that on ccc events in Europe) - Has no end to end crypto, at least if you're callin outside (from your asterisk) lines
Works like a charm when using wifi. Via 3G, openvpn makes sure, your provider won't know what hit them.
Advantages:
- Cheap
- Your own PBX
- Crypto as long as you're dialing inside your PBX
- Enables you to use other VoIP-phones, too
It has a few disadvantages though:
- Eats right through your battery (esp. the wifi part)
- Bad coverage ruins your calls
- Needs root on your android for openvpn
- Needs some server (for asterisk && openvpn)
- Needs a bit know how to set up correctly (I'm doing lectures about that on ccc events in Europe)
- Has no end to end crypto, at least if you're callin outside (from your asterisk) lines
(Sorry for the previous comment - darn html formatting..)
I did it for a few months with Gizmo5 and my old Nokia e71, which can be set up to use SIP out of the box. I had some pre-paid voice minutes as a back up. Voip over 3g was so bad that everyone always complained they couldn't hear me. That was about a year and a half ago. I ended up getting a Droid with full voice and data instead. Yeah I still hate paying that much for the data and voice plans. At least I'm on a family plan for voice so I'm only paying $10 extra for it. So to me that's not too bad.
I don't remember setting it, but it's set to 'never' already. I'll keep an eye on whether it really disconnects as often as I thought.
For reference as to how to set it: a quick google says: Settings>Wireless and Network>WIFI Settings>Menu Button>Advanced>Sleep Policy to Never .
N900 voip calls over wifi work okay. I have a pretty sucky ISP (Time Warner / Roadrunner. Monopoly in my neighborhood.) and the bandwidth I get varies all over the map from less than 100KB to the advertised 1MB, but the voip calls work and don't drop. I am always starting to talk at the same time as the other person because of the jitter etc issues. Also, probably because I don't have my router set up right, for about half a second at the beginning of the call, speech is really chopped up. After that, I guess, it allocates the necessary bandwidth and it's okay.
Setup on the N900 is effortless, as people have pointed out. Enter the data, and the N900 finds the networks for you and hops on. What I haven't figured out, and I'd be glad if the parent mentioned how he did it, is how I can *stop* it from falling back to 3G. For some reason, it's always trying to route calls through T-mobile first and I have to keep selecting wifi.
My T-mobile plan is a $10/mo pay-as-you-go which, after the first year can be extended for $1/month. So, starting in July, I'll have cell service for $12 per year. I'm looking forward to it, since whole months go by without me using cell at all. Call quality on cell networks is crystal clear.
I have nothing but good things to say about Callcentric. They're 2cents/min, and ~$4 monthly for fees and 911 service. They do need a bit more savvy to hook up than Skype. Unlike Skype, though, they actually work all the time for every call. (I don't have anything to do with either company, except paying a bill for service.)
My setup was any Symbian phone with Fring and VoIPCheap with 3 UK.
This is just because phones like the n95, n80, e71, e55 are cheap. The network can be data only if you want by using a dongle sim but little point in that
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