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VOIP Meets Cell Phones

Posted by michael on Fri Dec 03, 2004 03:51 PM
from the loophole-exploitation dept.
Communications The Internet
pnutjam writes "This looks really interesting. It looks like this company, Xcelis, has a bunch of cellphones hooked to VOIP equipment. Basically you pay them and if you have free in-network calling on your phone you call their phone and then dial out to whomever you want. Voila, unlimited calling to anyone."
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  • Great - there goes free unlimited in network calls (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sonofagunn (659927) on Friday December 03 2004, @03:53PM (#10991085)
    I hope this doesn't become too popular! Companies will have to raise prices elsewhere.
    • Yeah - this business model has the probable lifespan of a mayfly.

      • Re:Why? (Score:2, Informative)

        by freshman_a (136603)
        I see what you mean, but just because it doesn't cost the companies anything doesn't mean they won't raise prices to make more money if they know lots of people are using it.

      • Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by entrager (567758)
        Of course it costs them something. Why would I sign up for a 2000 minute plan when I can get unlimited calling to anyone on my 300 minute plan?
      • I have "unlimited" night and weekend minutes and "unlimited" mobile to mobile minutes on my Cingular plan. When I looked at my usage online a few months ago, it turns out that I indeed did not have truly unlimited airtime: I had 99999 N/W and 99999 M2M minutes each month. Of course, this is more than twice the number of actual minutes in any given month, so there was no way I would ever exceed those minutes, so they were in fact unlimited to me. Now that I've added my brother and sister as additional lines on my plan and we draw from the same minute pool, it would be possible for us to exhaust all those minutes, but we would each have to spend 16 hours a day on the phone. Not gonna happen. That, and it was probably easier to program the billing system with a very high threshold for "unlimited" plans and not worry about it rather than programming truly unlimited minutes.

        CyberDave

  • Unlimited (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SilkBD (533537)
    When will the wireless networks give us unlimited plans as an option... that's what I want to know. VoIP is too buggy... there are numbers that you can't call and faxes don't like it.

    • Re:Unlimited (Score:4, Interesting)

      by epod (726223) on Friday December 03 2004, @04:06PM (#10991265)
      Actually, in Canada, Telus already had an unlimited calling plan in the city of Winnipeg. It was $30 CDN a month, unlimited local calling all the time. It was their marketing gimmick to get into a new market. The only problem is, due to their contact the user is entitled to renew their contract when it expires for the same plan ad infinitum. This has led to those cell phone plans being bought and sold for as much as $3000, since as long as you renew it, you've got an unlimited cellphone for life for $30.
    • The success with a VOIP depends on many factors. There are many companies who provide VOIP service who meet the QOS rule of five nines (99.999% uptime). It depends on the type of service you sign-up for with the VOIP provider. What may be suprising to find out is that many cellular providers are already using VOIP on the backend to process calls, but it is transparent to the user.

      Less overhead (bandwidth) is needed to handle voice calls than data/fax calls. There are plenty of companies who provide VOIP Fa

  • Nice idea but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DarkHelmet (120004) * <mark.seventhcycle@net> on Friday December 03 2004, @03:53PM (#10991094) Homepage
    I really like the idea but...

    This is very inconvenient, because it essentially makes the addressbook on my cell phone useless. I'd love to have something that just automatically routes calls through them. That would definately add to the value of their service.

    This, and what about incoming calls? I believe most cell phone companies still count your # of minutes based on people calling you, as well as your outbound calls.

    • what about incoming calls

      How about removing the phone companies from the picture and just have basically Route your call like DNS does or like DHCP giving you an IP address. Instead of dialing a phone number you would dial something like voip://yourname.yourhost.com.

    • Pause Feature (Score:5, Informative)

      by Myriad (89793) <myriad@the b s o d . c om> on Friday December 03 2004, @04:05PM (#10991252) Homepage
      This is very inconvenient, because it essentially makes the addressbook on my cell phone useless. I'd love to have something that just automatically routes calls through them. That would definately add to the value of their service.

      Not necessarily... while it would no longer be as simple as entering the number of the person you want to call, many phones will let you daisy chain them with a Pause feature. This feature tells the autodialer to wait n number of seconds (or half seconds or what have you for the particular phone) before dialing more numbers.

      So you set it up to dial your access number, say 702-555-1212. You want it to then call your destination number, say 613-555-1234. You would then program the phone to dial:
      702-555-1212,,,,613-555-1234
      (the comma representing whatever character your phone uses to indicate a pause).

      This way the phone dials the access number, waits a few seconds to let that call process and the service connect, then dials your destination number.

      You could even insert access codes if necessary with additional pauses if need be (ie code 1234):
      702-555-1212,,,1234,,,,613-555-1234

      It is more work to setup, and you'd need to figure out what sort of delay you needed, but otherwise it should work. The ability to pause and enter more digits has been built into many phones for years...

      Blockwars [blockwars.com]: Free, multiplayer, head to head game.

      • Re:Pause Feature (Score:5, Funny)

        by DarkHelmet (120004) * <mark.seventhcycle@net> on Friday December 03 2004, @04:09PM (#10991293) Homepage
        Let me try and adapt the form to the phone companies. It's a joke... laugh...
        Your post advocates a

        (x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

        approach to changing the phone system. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
        (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other
        flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

        (X) Most phone users will not put up with punching letters on a keypad (SMS anyone)
        (X) Phone companies will not put up with it
        ( ) The police will not put up with it
        (X) Requires too much cooperation from phone companies
        (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
        (X) Many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers

        Specifically, your plan fails to account for

        (X) Foreign countries
        ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
        (X) Asshats
        (X) Jurisdictional problems
        (X) Public reluctance
        ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
        (X) Susceptibility of protocols to attack
        ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
        (X) Technically illiterate politicians

        and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

        (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
        been shown practical
        (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
        ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
        ( ) Killing phone companies is not slow and painful enough

        Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

        (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
        ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
        ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
        house down!
    • I use a pretty ancient CDMA cellphone, the Motorola Startac ST7868W. It has the ability to place calling-card and PBX extension calls from the phone book. After sending a number, it can send digits as DTMF, complete with the necessary timed delays and pauses. You can use this feature to call a calling card access number and then automatically dial access code and real destination number, or to call your main office number and then enter digits to ring a certain extension. I also use it to enter the access
    • Not useless. All of the cell phones that I have used have mechanisms to automate touch-tone voice menus. So you could for could easily prefix the (out of network) numbers on your cell phone with this number. You'd have to do it for each one, but in most cases I'd expect you would really only want to do it for a few expensive (out of country) or frequently called (girlfriend out of network) numbers, and let the rest of the calls count against your normal minutes.

      If you were concerned about incomming calls I

  • Well, if not already in there (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lottameez (816335) on Friday December 03 2004, @03:54PM (#10991115)
    I suspect the cell phone companies user contract will contain a provision prohibiting you from dialing a service such as this.
    • no, they will just prohibit you from running a service like this. Voila, all the phones the company has for accepting incoming calls go bye-bye.
    • Or the contract will just contain a provision prohibiting you from offering a service such as this.
    • I have no real knowledge to back this up, but I'd be willing to bet that cell providers can't legally disallow you from calling a given phone number.
    • I wouldn't put it past the cell phone companies to try this, but on what basis? I mean, if it's a local call for the cell phone, then in terms of the usage of the cell phone network, it's a local call, right? So what's the basis for prohibiting it (or putting a surcharge on it, which IMHO would make more sense for the cell companies to try)?
      • Under certain conditions, there may be no way to detect this without voilating the wiretap laws.

        The companies that offer and allow the better and greater service will make more money that those who attempt to corner the market. Especially in this market.

    • I suspect the cell phone companies user contract will contain a provision prohibiting you from dialing a service such as this.

      That sounds unlikely. Either they'd have to be the ones blocking it or they wouldn't have much to say.

      Really ... if they had a policy that said "you may not call our competitors to compare rates using our phone" it would be just as meaningless.

      You'll still be paying the cell-company for the air-time you use with them, it's not like you'd not be using their network.

      Cheers

  • Can you here me NOW? (Score:5, Funny)

    by YrWrstNtmr (564987) on Friday December 03 2004, @03:56PM (#10991129)
    Great

    So you can have the underwater sound of a regular cellphone, combined with the intermittent stuttering of VoIP.

    • I was just thinking about this myself. Layering abstract technologies like this can only lead to combination of 'bugs' and 'issues' leading towards an overall lower quality service. Now whether or not people will accept this is another issue to discuss...

  • Generally any kind of free call comes with associated restrictions. It can be as vague as 'reasonable use', but it's almost always there. So, unless they've agreed this specifically with the cell phone providers... aren't they breaking their TOS?

  • Am I the only one who doesn't get it? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PCM2 (4486) on Friday December 03 2004, @03:59PM (#10991160) Homepage
    At first I thought this sounded interesting for international calls, but now I see that international calls are not permitted, at least during the trial period. Am I the only one who can't figure out what this is for? I have free long distance on all my mobile phone minutes. I have unlimited calling on off-peak hours and more anytime minutes than I would possibly want to spend on my phone in a given month. Looking at the other plans my provider offers, I'd bet you couldn't even take advantage of some of them unless you had an extra battery for your phone. Who is the target market for this?

    • Re:Am I the only one who doesn't get it? (Score:4, Informative)

      by BridgeBum (11413) on Friday December 03 2004, @04:06PM (#10991272)
      The target market is people who have unlimited mobile-to-mobile calls, but would have to pay for calls to land lines during business hours. The call you make is to a mobile number, allowing you to effective have unlimited minutes to any number.
    • The big benefit of this is that you can reduce the plan that you're on. Why get the 1000 minute plan when you can get the 300 minute plan? Off peak might be free, but if you need to make lots of calls on peak, it would be quite useful.

      Frankly though I can't imagine that this operation will be around for long. Phone companies are not going to tolerate somebody manipulating their market like this to make some money at their expense.
  • a beowulf clust of cell phon.....crap!

  • Cellular? Bah! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chainsaw1 (89967) on Friday December 03 2004, @04:01PM (#10991201)
    Just take the cellphone out of the picture entirely [zyxel.com]
  • You could do this for yourself or for a small company which is a great idea!

  • D-Bus API in skype Asterisk anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lkcl (517947) on Friday December 03 2004, @04:03PM (#10991229) Homepage
    when skype release their linux version with a d-bus API it will be possible to do this yourself.

  • Don't do it. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Verizon can and is terminating accounts of people using this service. Others will follow suit...

    The providers know about this service and hate it, and also have enough money to crush it. So don't plan on umlimited minute plans for the time being.

  • nothing new (Score:5, Informative)

    by JDizzy (85499) on Friday December 03 2004, @04:05PM (#10991259) Homepage Journal
    This is nothing new, Verizon already uses Voip on the back-end of their cellphone network, although most people don't know that. VZ is converting their entire telephony network to a managed IP network and all call legs are slowly being converted to Voip/Sip. So that means for cell phones, the switch at the tower does the conversion of voice to IP, and the end-user is never the wiser. Now a cell phone that has a sip stack is an entire different thing, and that is being worked on. In other words there are two Voip implementations: one, where you have Voip from the phone you use (has an Ip address, etc), and two the transitional where you get a typical phone and that is converted to IP down-stream. So cell phones these days can connect to an IP network, browse online, etc. once that is more standard you will start to see cell phones that have optional soft-phones built-in aka SIP plus RTP stacks.

      • Re:nothing new (Score:3, Insightful)

        by O (90420)

        Heh, knew I'd seen something like this in Wired several years back.

        http://wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/fetish.html [wired.com]

        Cellular Division

        Hang ViperCell antennas on the walls of your company's far-flung locations, connect them to the Ethernet, and pow: Your branch offices are now free-calling zones for cell phones. Using cellular voice-over-IP, ViperCell intercepts calls or messages sent with GSM or PCS phones, then routes them via your network - and your regular cell provider will never know.

        ViperCell:

  • bigzoo.com (Score:3, Informative)

    by Mantorp (142371) <mantorp 'funny A' gmail.com> on Friday December 03 2004, @04:06PM (#10991268) Homepage Journal
    is similar to this. You prepay for minutes then you call a local or tollfree number and they route your calls over the internet. Kick ass international rates too. Highly recommended.

    They use caller id to identify you so no need for pin codes, and they have an online phone book with speed dial. I'm using skypeout to call from home and bigzoo from my cell and pay on average

  • Privacy? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wow, 45 comments and not a single one bemoaning the privacy issues? What has become of Slashdot?

    If you sign up for this service, Xcelis will be in a fantastic position of keeping track of ALL the calls you make through your cellphone. Who you called, how long you talked to them, perhaps even what you talked about. Hmmm, Xcelis might just be a front for the American Spy Agency^W^W^W Dept of Homeland Security.

  • Bad lag! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by entrager (567758) on Friday December 03 2004, @04:12PM (#10991335)
    I have Vonage VoIP service at home on a cable modem connection. When I talk to a cell phone user over my VoIP phone, there is a noticable lag that occurs. I've gotten used to it, but initially my wife and I found ourselves talking over each other all the time because of the 1-2 second delay. It sounds to me like this service will only compound that problem.
  • Do mobile plans in the States really have mobile-to-mobile options that don't use up your minutes? That's cool. I don't think any of the providers in Canada have that, but getting unlimited local calling is pretty easy.

    I've got my cell on a plan with unlimited local evenings & weekends, and then use one of those ubiquitous call #X, enter account, password and destination # type plans. Similar to calling cards, but it's 500 minutes/month for CAD10. www.onlinetel.com. It's pretty easy to enter the e

  • VOIP?? That's kid's stuff (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Check THIS out: http://bobanddavid.com/cinco.html [bobanddavid.com]

    CINCO!!

  • If it's successful... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All they'll accomplish is eliminating unlimited mobile to mobile minutes for everyone. The cell company isn't going to take a loss or provide service for free. Currently, the mobile to mobile minutes are more of a gimmick to get the friends/family of their customers to switch than anything. If this ceases to be an incentive because services like this make it irrelevant then they'll stop offering them.

    Mike

  • Legislation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by killmenow (184444) on Friday December 03 2004, @04:35PM (#10991580)
    A bill to outlaw this type of service will be written by one or many cellular providers and presented to one or many congresstools in 3...2...1...

  • The Home Kit would be a good seller... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MDMurphy (208495) on Friday December 03 2004, @04:56PM (#10991833) Homepage
    I agree that this will likely have a short shelf life. The extreme # of minutes on their cell phones will stand out like a flashing beacon to the cell carriers.

    But, a "home version" would be interesting. Two phones with the minimal accounts for unlimited mobile to mobile would still be cheaper than one of the mega minute plans. A kit to connect your "home" cell phone to your Vonage box would do the trick. The cell carriers wouldn't see the insane #'s of minutes on a service providers accounts but just you calling your other phone often. A slick trick would be to allow bi-directional calling with this kit.

    In early days of PacBell GSM here in CA they had 1st incoming minute free. I had my SIM in a box with a GPS receiver attached. I could call from a land line every minute, poll for position, hang up under a minute. One month I made 1800 sub-minute calls to my mobile to track my cars location.

    They later ammended the plan to not include data calls and then scrapped the 1st minute plan all together, but I got a lot of testing in before they did.

  • Haha (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jesus IS the Devil (317662) on Friday December 03 2004, @05:07PM (#10991957)
    It's pretty obvious this is a really dumb idea. Most of the previous responses have detailed the reasons why.

    What I really see is PDA phones having WIFI or better yet, WIMAX, connecting to a network and doing VOIP that way, thereby completely bypassing the cell phone company.

    That way, when you have WIFI, you call for free (or very low cost). When you don't have WIFI coverage, you dial out using the cell phone network.

    Now THAT'S cell phone VOIP! Not this load of crap lol.

  • I went another direction (Score:4, Interesting)

    by krray (605395) on Friday December 03 2004, @05:34PM (#10992231)
    On a back end web server listening on a re-directed port along with a password and you're prompted with:
    ENTER CURRENT #: (let's enter 19998887777)
    TRANSFER TO #: (let's enter 15554443333) ...and then the "old" modem in that computer taps C-Kermit and dials specifically:
    atdt ,19998887777,,,,5,!,*97,15554443333,,;

    So, it calls me (pauses due to finding the cell phone I may be holding), dials "5" for the heck of it (lets me know it is working :), flashes the line, dials my transfer code (*97) and dumps me to the phone number I entered.

    Free unlimited calls anywhere I go already ... as long as I can tap a web browser somehow. :)

  • Unlimited Calling! Not. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bs_02_06_02 (670476) on Friday December 03 2004, @06:21PM (#10992687)
    Everyone has seen the advertising. Plans are sold with free unlimited in-network calling. If you read the boilerplate in your service agreement, you'll see something that reads (paraphrased) abuse of the network (re:unlimited free calling) is subject to termination.

    Unlimited free in-network calling doesn't mean UNLIMITED. It means unlimited until they choose to see otherwise, labelling it as "abuse" of their network. They have the right to terminate you for such abuse.
    What kind of abuse? It is up to your provider. Don't like it? Walk away. Or live with it. Most people don't abuse it. But there are plenty that try.

  • inside/outside, leave me alone (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Friday December 03 2004, @07:20PM (#10993211) Homepage Journal
    Why don't they just do this with 2 different mobile networks: two sets of phones (1 set from each network with free in-network calls), connected in pairs through their gateway? Then they can market free calls to each network's subscribers, without relying on iffy VoIP, with its lower quality and smaller market of tightwadder customers? I smell a pure, unscalable gimmick.

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