Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 22 Jul 2005 13:28:10 GMT
Om says that the Nokia 6682 is now availably directly from Nokia’s website for $599. The 6682 is Nokia’s current high-end business phone–you can spend more on one of their communicator models or on a fashion phone, but if you’re looking for a regular phone with lots of features, the 6682’s about as good as you’re going to do in GSM-land.
The site that started this also mentions that the Nokia N90 is nearly available. The N90 is basically a specialized camera-phone, with a real lens and a formfactor that’s designed to make the camera more usable. It also has the highest-resolution screen that I’ve ever seen on a phone–352x416. If it had WiFi like the N91, then I’d probably be drooling over it. As it is, I’m waiting to see what’s available in February when my current Cingular plan runs out. If the N91 actually includes a SIP client (as has been rumored), then I’ll be very tempted.
Posted in Phones | Tags gsm, n90, n91, nokia, nokia6682, nokian90, nokian91, phone | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 08 Jul 2005 18:35:26 GMT
I want to see a combination VoIP/MVNO double-play. That’s one company that sells cellular service (using someone else’s network), sells VoIP service, and integrates the two services.
There are two specific scenarios that seem obvious:
They sell the customer mobile phone service and VoIP service via an ATA or SIP hardphone. This would be great for people who have turned off their home phone service while continuing to pay for some form of Internet access. One number would ring both devices, the first one to pick up wins. Outgoing calls would have the same caller ID from either device. Alternate products would be family plans with multiple phones, each with their own number, then a shared number that will ring all devices; and centrex plans for small businesses, where the company provides both VoIP desk phones and mobile phones.
They sell the customer mobile phone service and act like a SIP client. This way the customer can integrate their mobile phones directly into their existing phone system. Ideally, the MVNO’s SIP gateway will register and unregister with the SIP PBX as the phone gains and loses service; this will let the PBX do the Right Thing with voicemail, and also enable a number of other services.
Personally, I’d love to buy services like this. I’d prefer GSM phones, simply because the most interesting phones are almost always GSM-only. Accoring to Cellular News, there are at least three GSM MVNOs in the US right now, using both Cingular and T-Mobile’s networks, so this is certainly possible.
On the hardware front, several companies seem to be providing GSM/SIP gateway equipment:
It’s possible that Earthlink will be rolling something like this out soon–they’re building a MVNO, and they share at least one board member with Bridgeport Networks. They seem to be concentrating more on EV-DO then anything GSM-related, though.
There seems to be a huge push in the cellular industry to integrate SIP into their networks, so something like this will be possible sooner or later. My current contract with Cingular is up in 6 months; it’d be nice if someone has something on the market that I can buy by then.
Posted in Phones, Asterisk | Tags asterisk, gsm, mvno, phone, sip, voip | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 12 May 2005 14:11:30 GMT
Since I’ve been having problems with my Verizon POTS line, I decided that it’s finally time to look into porting my main home phone number to a VoIP service. Right now, I’m using call forwarding on the line, so all incoming calls come in via VoIP anyway; using local number portability (LNP) to move the number directly onto a VoIP service won’t really make things any less reliable, but it will save me $15 or $20 per month.
I’ve been using NuFone for most of my VoIP traffic for over a year, but they only provide local numbers in Michigan; I’m in Washington, so that’s not very useful to me. I did a bit of research, and Teliax comes highly recommended on the Asterisk-Users mailing list and they’re able to do LNP ports in my rate center. Teliax seems to be sort of a cross between full-service VoIP providers like Vonage and pre-paid wholesale providers like NuFone–they have both prepaid by-the-minute plans and monthly minutes-included plans. Even the prepaid plans include the option of having them provide voicemail; it’s not very useful to me when I have my own Asterisk server, but I like the idea of having a provider that I use that I can recommend to non-Asterisk users.
Since Teliax can provide the service that I need, I went ahead and signed up. It only took a couple minutes to enter all of my data on their website, and my new incoming number was active immediately. Their support website includes Asterisk configuration snippets, dynamically-generated with my username and password, so all I had to do was paste them into my Asterisk config files and everything worked.
The one thing that I noticed immediately was that Teliax calls sounded a lot better then NuFone calls. By default Teliax uses the GSM codec, while I had NuFone set up for ILBC. By most accounts, ILBC should sound slightly better then GSM, so I’m not really sure what’s up. I changed my NuFone settings to use GSM, and suddenly the slightly swimmy sound that I’d been hearing on NuFone calls for the past few weeks went away. I suspect that my Asterisk build has a slightly-broken ILBC codec, but I wouldn’t have noticed this if I hadn’t added a Teliax account. Since this isn’t the first time that I’ve had ILBC problems, I’m going to drop it and stick with GSM for now. If it starts bothering me too much, then I’ll consider paying $10 and licensing G.729 from Digium, but I doubt there’s any purpose in doing that.
So far, I’ve only used Teliax for about 12 hours, and I haven’t ran more then a handful of calls through them, but so far them seem great. I have Asterisk set to reject them and log a message if their ping time rises over 400ms, but it didn’t trigger overnight. If it can make it a couple days without 400ms worth of network problems, then I’ll start the process of porting my home phone number to Teliax. For now, I’m going to change the forwarding on my Verizon POTS line to point to Teliax instead of NuFone.
Posted in Asterisk | Tags asterisk, gsm, ilbc, lnp, nufone, teliax, voip | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 03 Sep 2004 23:46:09 GMT
WiFi Networking News is reporting that an industry group is building specs for roaming between WiFi and GSM networks. The group includes most of the big players: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, T-Mobile, Cingular, AT&T Wireless, Alcatel, and others. The “Unlicensed Mobile Access” (UMA) spec is supposed to make it possible for users to use a WiFi-enabled cell phone and have calls seamlessly handed off between GSM, public WiFI, and private WiFi networks.
Personally, I’d love to be able to roam between my home wireless/VoIP network and the cellular network, and at least in theory that’s what this group is working on, but I have real doubt about any of the carriers implementing this in any reasonable manner. I can’t see any obvious business case for them letting users migrate calls off of the carriers’ high-priced networks and onto low-cost private networks. If wireless rates free-fall, like some have predicted, then it’s possible that they could use this to prop up their revenue, but that’s about the only case that I can see for it–most carriers seem very determined to keep people from migrating traffic off of their networks in any way, shape, or form. Witness the Verizon Bluetooth Debacle for an example–the carriers don’t seem to have a problem with working against their customers best interests. As consolidation continues in the industry, I fully expect to see more cartel-like behavior on their parts, and less innovation and flexibility.
Posted in Phones, Computer Networking | Tags gsm, voip, wifi | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 20 Jul 2004 21:30:57 GMT
Pretty much everyone has been talking about AT&T Wireless’s 3G rollout. They’re providing ~250 Kbps service in 4 cities, including Seattle. Since I’m a current AT&T Wireless subscriber and I live in Seattle, I’ve been paying more attention to this story then normal.
Right now, AT&T Wireless has the worst GPRS data prices in the industry–last time I checked, they wanted $80 for unlimited usage, where “unlimited” doesn’t exactly mean what you’d expect it to mean–it’s really something like 50-100 MB/month. Compared to Sprint and T-Mobile’s $15-$20 rates, it’s clean that AT&T doesn’t want people to actually use the data features on the phones that they’re selling.
Given their GPRS pricing, I was surprised to see that they’re offering unlimited UMTS 3G service to consumers for $25/month. Of course, AT&T Wireless being who they are, apparently they’re still confused about the word “unlimited.” According to mpx200.org, “unlimited” access is limited to AT&T’s mMode portal via the phone’s screen and keyboard:
I have been reading a lot about the UTMS roll out over the past week and one thing that kept jumping out at me was the $24.99 for an Unlimited Enhanced mMode Plan. I read this $24.99 unlimited so I give AWS a call. I know that I can’t get UTMS in good old Binghamton NY but maybe they would honor that plan for my old GPRS connection. Flat out, NO!
This plan is only for UTMS customers in the 4 magical cities under these very strict rules:
- You may web browse but the mMode site only
- You may get email but via mMode only
- You may not connect to another device via cable, Bluetooth, or IR or you will be charged $0.001/KB
- You may not remove the SIM from your phone and use any other device or you will be charged $0.001/KB
- You may NOT use this service for audio/video content, games, and other downloads or there will be an additional charge.
So what is this rate? Cheap, sure, many people may fall for this plan and believe that they are being competitive with T-Mobile. Is the plan useful? Probably not, that is an awfully limited service, once again AT&T puts such a noose on you that their service becomes a joke.
You know, it’s things like this that make AT&T Wireless the laughingstock of the wireless industry. It’s like they’re actively trying to piss off customers. I just don’t understand why they don’t just sell customers what they want (unlimited access to the web for a reasonable rate) rather then continuing to push their crappy mMode portal on people.
At least they sell real phones, unlike Verizon.
Posted in Phones | Tags 3g, att, gsm | 1 comment
