VOIP Cell Phones Coming Soon

prostoalex writes "Associated Press reports on the latest cell phones with WiFi support demoed at this year's CTIA Wireless 2006 conference. New models fall back to WiFi hotspot when the user is at home, at work, or cellular signal gets too weak. Biggest surprise? The cell phone conversation is not dropped when the switch between cellular network and WiFi hotspot takes place."

Re:Phone number

[Elminst]

And I just realized that my comment doesn't really address your real concern; that the internet carriers are going to want a piece of the pie for carrying data for the cell phone carriers.
The upside is that many of them are owned by the same people, eg. Cingular is owned by ATT & BellSouth. Verizon is, well, Verizon.

Although it's mentioned in the article that "internet minutes" may be cheaper that "cell tower" minutes because wifi radio spectrum and the internet are cheaper than running cell towers.

But the problem comes when you're not at home. Pop down to the coffee shop and start talking on your cell phone using the wifi hotspot. You pay the cell company less... but who pays the internet bill for your cell traffic?

Sounds like a new level of peering agreement wars... Yay.

I'm looking forward to a big surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Biggest surprise? The cell phone conversation is not dropped I already have a WiFi phone. It doesn't even attempt to be a cellphone. It's pure WiFi. It's a UT Starcom F1000. It can't even make it longer than 12 hours without CRASHING. That's not 12 hours of active use, that's not even making a single phone call, that's just sitting there on my desk, right next to my WiFi box, doing nothing. It goes into "downloading firmware" mode and that's it, it needs to be power cycled, and there's no way to stop it from doing this. This was the device I paid $100 for from Broadvoice. If someone could just point me in the direction of a plain old WiFi device that doesn't crash all the time, that doesn't miss my calls, and that reliably links in to my WiFi, I'll be plenty surprised by that, thank you. I have just ordered a conventional phone adapter to replace it. I guess my Starcom will go into my closet somewhere and then I'll sell it on Ebay as an antique 50 years from now for $10,000 which will be enough for me to get a latte, if they still make those and they're still legal.

------------
Contact management, calendar management, phone backup [contempo.biz]

British Telecom already sells wireless VOIP cells

[evilandi]

British Telecom's "Fusion" service [bt.com] already provides this. It uses a variant of either the Motorola Razr V3 or Motorola V560 cellphone with Bluetooth, and is shipped with a dedicated BT Bluetooth & WiFi ADSL router that handles both the VOIP calls and regular broadband access for home computers. It's available to anyone in the UK with a British Telecom phoneline that supports ADSL broadband - which is over 99% of the population, including almost all rural areas such as mine.

Most people think the calls route over the normal analogue voice line, but the giveaway that it is VOIP is on this page [bt.com] where they state "can make up to three simultaneous calls", obviously this is must therefore be routed over the ADSL side rather than the voice side.

Re:Shouldn't it be reverse?

[johndapunk]

A good reason not to do this is availibility cell tower slots and resulting customer service issue of dropped calls. Cingular is advertising their great low drop call percentage... what they don't tell you is the number of calls that are not able to be completed. I live in a college town and at busy hours of the day I cannot make a phone call for one to two hour stretches. The thing to consider is that cell towers have a greater service area, so when you leave the WiFi hotspot and try to use the nice big cell tower, you call gets dropped because the tower can not handle your call. This makes people angry that their call got dropped by their provider and may make them want to switch. The whole idea is that falling back onto the WiFi hotspot will give the uptime for calls. Generally the only time cell coverage will drop is when you go inside builds, which is also the place where you have the greatest chance of picking up a WiFi signal. I can't wait for my WiMax phone :-)

Biggest Suprise?

[LowbrowDeluxe]

"The cell phone conversation is not dropped when the switch between cellular network and WiFi hotspot takes place."

Speaking as ex tech-support for an VOIP service that will remain anonymous, allow me to say that half the time American VOIP service over anything except fiber-optic can't manage to maintain a phone call period. =p
I'm not sure I believe the Japanese firms are really doing it any better, but they do have a better infrastructure set up, so maybe it does work halfway decently.

It might help if the half of America that jumped on VOIP because it was cheap would at least update the rest of their technology along with it. No matter how good the connection your ISP is giving you is, if you're still using a modem and router that would manage higher data transmission rates if converted to carrier pigeon roosts, your overall experience will be lousy.
And wiring. Ma Bell laid copper wire may be good enough for the telecomms to still wring a profit out of, but it's probably not helping your connection any. Nor are the cords that have been hidden behind your desk getting chewed by cats for the last ten years.
Also, interference from large stacks of electronics piled on your desk, certain brands of laptop and ginormous desktop monitors, halogen lights, and having metals like a fridge, or say, wall full of plumbing between your wireless router and where-ever you're trying to use equipment.
Allright, I'm going to shut up now. Suffice to say, I could go on for two more pages at least.
It's a good technology with 'a lot of potential', but as for something for widespread daily use? That marriage of consumer and product will be about as good as the one to the girl with the 'nice personality'. If they were lying about the personality. =p

And then there's cell phones. Never did the tech support for those, but I saw it.
"Your cell phone isn't working? Hmmm, let me check a few things."
*Anonymous network down across the entire southwest*
"Well, it might be a network problem, we'll get you back up as soon as possible. What? No, only a few people affected I'm sure."

Ah, the lies, the horrible, horrible lies.....

*cough* Sorry, my therapist said I was over it....

*He lied too!!!!*

Perhaps this guy can use it

[mgabrys_sf]

Looks like some people need VOIP badly.

A guy in Malaysia got hit with a 281 trillion dollar bill:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12247590/ [msn.com]

And believe it or not, the phone company hasn't fessed up to an error as of yet and is threatening full criminal charges for non-payment.

What's the interest on a 281 trillion dollar loan anyway? I think only the US Treasury could tabulate it.

Re:It already prefers wifi over cellular

[Anonymous Coward]

fall back to WiFi hotspot when the user is at home, at work

I agree that the wording could be better

Indeed, the wording is confusing. Usually fall back means "use a lesser alternative when the preferred alternative is not available".

In this context, "preferred" means "cheaper", and the system should "fall back" to cell only if a trusted wifi is not available, not the other way round.

Or, alternatively: "spring forward to WiFi hotspot when the user is at home, at work". Ha!

Surprise, surprise

[suv4x4]

"Biggest surprise? The cell phone conversation is not dropped when the switch between cellular network and WiFi hotspot takes place."

That'd be the only surprize, since there are phones that use wifi for walkie talkie emulation for some time now.

One could really wonder how is this supposed to work at all, after all the whining from big telcos, how VOIP support needs special quality of service (QoS)to ensure low latency, no skipping, mangling etc. to work.

But then again who believes telcos anyway.

Dual mode is the easy bit

[EmbeddedJanitor]

It's the clean in-call handover that is hard and will require a Skype-like service that is tied in with the telco's cell handling to get the call handover to happen. That is going to lock you in to your telco so they'll still be able to screw you for the call.

Ericsson demoed some Bluetooth handsets that could do clean handover a long while back. THese would use BT to BT for short distance and could then switch to BT--POTS and finally cell. I don't think this was ever commercialised.

NASA tapping WIFI / VOIP for voice?

[David Hume]

It probably should be, but I have a feeling that the switch only goes one way: cellular to wifi.

all of this raises an interesting question. Is the NSA currently tapping / sniffing the Interenet for voice? That is, tapping / sniffing VOIP?

And if not, will this hasten the day when NASA does so? I can hear it now. "All of these people are now connected end to end via WIFI and VOIP through their cell phones. We must be able to tap / sniff those conversations.
 

Re:Surprise, surprise

[1uk34dd0]

It does work. I use the BT Fusion service here in the UK and the transfer between mobile/cell network and VoIP is almost seemless everytime. http://www.btfusionorder.bt.com/ [bt.com]

Re:Phone number

[FireFury03]

Most likely, the phones would be polled every few minutes to see what they're attached to.
In much the same way that the cell towers check to see if your phone is still within range when you're not using it. This is the reason your phone sets off your speakers or makes your monitor twitch randomly

Actually, GSM phones don't get polled very frequently at all (usually every few hours ISTR). But the phone listens to the base station and if it goes out of range of one and into range of the other it will transmit to inform the network that it's moved. If the phone outright goes out of range then the first the network usually knows about it is when it tries to contact the phone (e.g. to place a call or send an SMS) and doesn't get a response. Which is why there is sometimes a few seconds of silence after dialling an out-of-coverage cellphone before it drops you through to voicemail - it's trying to contact the phone in it's last known cell and when that times out you get forwarded to voicemail.

Polling the phone regularly has the disadvantage that the phone has to transmit acks regularly too and transmitting eats the batteries. Far better for the phone to just listen and only transmit to tell the network that it's moved.

I imagine that the way this system will work is to record both a "last known" cell and a "last known" IP address. The last known IP will be tried first and if it fails then the last known cell will be tried.

I'm not sure how they will bill for the seamless handoff stuff though - maybe the whole thing will be charged at cellular rates, in which case there doesn't seem to be a lot of advantage to the end user.

Re:Phone number

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not an expert, but these are precisely the sort of features that the IMS [wikipedia.org] (IP Multimedia Subsystem) is intended to deliver mobile network operators. The IMS is based primarily around SIP [wikipedia.org] which is a widely adopted open VoIP standard.

Given the amount of industry push behind IMS and SIP, I'd be very suprised if the VoIP service in this article was not deployed in this manner. Essentially the IMS should allow a phone to register itself with the telco's network over either the cellular network or the local WiFi hotspot. The decision of which one to use is presumably left upto the handset (although the network may be able to make some decisions here also).

Your point about the carriers not being too happy about this is probably true, as it will doubtless canibalise some of their existing markets. Their bet, I imagine, is on deriving revenue from the new services which a converged network can offer their users.

I'd imagine they'd initially try and derive extra revenue from allowing multiple devices to be proxied via a single number (SIP URI). i.e. When you're in the office on your pc you connect your SIP softphone (skype-like application), when you're away with your mobile you use that etc... People calling you only need to know the one number which will get routed appropriately.

There are a vast number of services which will be built on this infrastructure. The operators just need to open up a little more than they have done in the past. The dillema they face is can they open up and maintain a business model?

Re:It's aimed at mobile phone companies

[TheRaven64]

No, it's aimed at the end users. Just not yet. You can buy VOIP handsets that connect over 802.11 already. These are significantly cheaper than mobile 'phones. If you live in an area with ubiquitous WiFi, then they may be more economic than a full mobile. As WiFi coverage extends, this will be true for more and more people. This is likely to cut into the profits of the mobile 'phone manufacturers[1] as well as the carriers. Eventually, the VOIP handset market is likely to be as big as the mobile handset market, and the manufacturers want to make sure they have a cut.

[1] Don't make the mistake that many /. readers make of assuming that the handset manufacturers and the carriers have the same adgenda.

Calls wont drop with a cell/WiFi transition?

[Shishak]

That means that the phone will keep a VoIP session opened with the cell phone providers switch. The cell phone provider can continue to bill you insane per minute rates while you ride on someone elses network. Sounds like a great deal for the cell phone providers. As a VoIP provider I wonder if I can get a cell phone to connect back to me so I don't have to build network either.

Re:Shouldn't it be reverse?

[pNutz]

But you're paying cell rates to tunnel through Wifi, when you could be using a VoIP carrier over wifi. That's $19.95/month for unlimited minutes [broadvoice.com] vs. $100/month or so from a cell provider.

The GP seemed to think that minutes from the cell provider would be cheap or free over Wifi. This is unlikely and not indicated in the article.

Of course, you would have to buy your own phone for Wifi VoIP. At the moment they're like cell phones from 1995 and cost $200-500.

Re:Shouldn't it be reverse?

[LS]

To all the igornant moderators that marked this bit of uninformed sarcasm as insightful, I can tell you as someone who HAS moved to China, and has lived in Beijing for one year, that everything is actually quite customer oriented and personal here. You never have to talk to a machine on the phone, the person behind the counter ignores everyone else until finished dealing with you, everything is anonymous (gas, electric, phone, etc through smart cards), you can negotiate prices, and storefronts are generally realistic embodiments of customer needs, i.e. a simple counters with products, instead of disneylands designed by corporate offices. You usually don't have to deal with an anonymous beaurocracy that treats you like a number when you need service. At the retail level everything is pretty much unregulated, so the system is quite efficient. It's quite amazing and strange that things in the supposedly free-market USA are quite the opposite.

Ummmm....

[TubeSteak]

As far as I'm concerned real wi-fi phones which don't even let your carrier know how many wi-fi minutes you are using can't come soon enough.

If you want to talk to anyone, your cellphone-over-wifi connection needs to get terminated back into the regular phone system somehow.

That's what you pay for and it's why all the internet-only VIOP services are free, because they don't connect you into the PSTN.