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Wireless Carriers To Adopt New Real-Time Text Protocol By December 2017 (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The FCC is ready to adopt a proposal that'll bring a new protocol to wireless networks to help people with disabilities communicate. It's called real-time text (RTT) and will be a replacement for the aging teletypewriter devices that let users transmit text conversations over traditional phone lines. According to the FCC's statement, RTT will "allow Americans who are deaf, hard of hearing, speech disabled or deaf-blind to use the same wireless communications devices as their friends, relatives and colleagues, and more seamlessly integrate into tomorrow's communications networks." The big differentiator for RTT over current, commonly-used text-based messaging systems is that RTT messages are sent immediately as they're typed. The RTT technology will let text users communicate with people on voice-based phones and vice versa; it can also work easily in your standard smartphone, eliminating the need for specialized equipment. The proposal calls for RTT to roll out over wireless networks run by "larger carriers" by December of 2017.
I gave up my TDD/TTY a few years ago, when I started using my own cell phone to send texts to family and friends, as well as my boss. I thought I had seen the last of the TDD/TTY when I did so, and now I'm interested in seeing how the new RTT works.
Can't these small partial messages kill performance of a shared variable quality medium quite easily ?
This is really, really old technology.
VAX PHONE did this 37 years ago, and I'm sure that RSTS and other PDP-11 OSs had something similar.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
In most countries, people don't use sms that often due to exhorbitant prices, WhatsApp and others have jumped in. Now, after the Snowden leaks, it's not interesting because it's unencrypted. Most decent messengers have now added end to end encryption.
If you're shared medium, your office backbone, is a dial up connection then yes, small messages are inefficient.
In the US, dozens of packets from a user using this protocol are nothing compared to the billions of packets used by an HD video stream.
The other way around is much bigger problem. High bandwidth connections with lots of traffic means a lot of big queues. Queues murder latency and jitter. Telcos can and do use a lot of processing to try to speed the few latency-sensitive packets through the sea of data, but that's not free. Wireless carriers have to be good at doing so because 150ms or 250ms of latency is quite noticeable on a voice call.
Lots of really old technologies haven't been rolled out as ubiquitous standards yet.
My thoughts immediately jumped to RFC1459 - Good ol' Internet Relay Chat. There's been plenty of instant messenger applications over the years.
I don't quite see the advantage of "real time" though - watching someone type is boring, and they (or at least I) often go back and edit to fix typos or choose a different wording. One of the advantages to text is you can do that before committing.
=Smidge=
I don't quite see the advantage of "real time" though
It's easier than the IM prog printing "John Doe is typing a message". Also, people used to TTY/TTD are used to it, and probably don't want it changed.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
aunt judy died....
instead of
aunt judy dyed her hair red.
"real time" every character counts is NOT ALWAYS a good thing. i kinda like the one line at a time TTY tyvm. it's like 10 baud.. max.. and qwerty keyboards exist on phones ('soft' keyboards on smart phones, real ones on blackberries and many featureless 'feature' phones). how the fuck is this not supported by cell phones today without extra hardware?
How will this actually work? Will I be able to set up my own RTT relay server and run RTT sessions with people on their phones, or will this purely be a phone-company-controlled system?
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Please can we just get to the point where we use a open protocol
for voice the one that was forced on CISCO to prevent them owning the market was SIP why cant the wireless people simply use that ?
(they do for a lot of backhaul already)
if phones where simply SIP and IP based with legacy GSM for SMS and 2G then it would make life so much simpler
please let it be rfc5194
Do they mean something like email, xmpp, SMS, WhatsApp, telegram ...?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
As long as it doesn't replace SMS, or gives the option of manual commit, we'll be ok. Otherwise, I'd agree with the GP's comment about the edit before commit issue. As I don't want Siri auto-correcting "piano" to "penis" in my automatically sent text as "I" type it.....
It's so important, I'm hoping it gets posted again soon so it stays fresh in everybody's mind.
#DeleteChrome
I don't quite see the advantage of "real time" though - watching someone type is boring, and they (or at least I) often go back and edit to the fix typos or choose a different wording.
It's been a couple decades, so I don't remember if it was the old command-line "talk" or something else, but - we used to take advantage of the real time transmission feature all the time to make jokes and tweak the people we were chatting with.
#DeleteChrome
I tried TDD/TTY when I was a teen back in the early 90s. It was interesting, but I didn't like it compared to dial-up BBSes and Internet. I also did not want to use a third party to talk to people on the other end who didn't have TTY/TDD services for privacy reasons and I use a lot of technical terms. I recently checked to see things improved for Internet and smartphones, nope. I will stick with IMs, IRC, textings, e-mails, real-time chat, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).