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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.
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Sprint Relay data only plan?
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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?
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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).
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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...
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!
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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.
He doesn't yet, but he has a neighbor who's willing to give him one.
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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.
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