VOIP Meets Cell Phones

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."

Re:Why?

[freshman_a]

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.

Don't do it.

[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.

Pause Feature

[Myriad]

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.

nothing new

[JDizzy]

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.

bigzoo.com

[Mantorp]

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

Re:Am I the only one who doesn't get it?

[BridgeBum]

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.

Re:Unlimited

[wesmills]

Unlimited local, $30; unlimited LD, $40 [metropcs.com]

Unlimited local, $30; unlimited LD, $50; feature packages available [leapwireless.com]

Unlimited cellular minutes, $100 [nextel.com]

Re:Pause Feature

[DarkHelmet]

Shit, I replied to the wrong post... [slashdot.org]

Furthermore, this is what I think about myself:

(X) I'm a stupid assh0le!

Re:Great - there goes free unlimited in network ca

[CyberDave]

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

Re:Unlimited

[Precion]

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 Fax using the T.38 protocol) which is reliable.

Compared to the traditional telephone VOIP is in its infancy. Marginal improvement have been made over the last couple of years thanks to the OpenSource movement. If you really want to find out more about VOIP checkout the OpenSource Asterisk PBX at asterisk.org.