I got Vonage to cut my landline bills. My hope was that it could also help with my much bigger mobile bills. It looks like it will. The big bills are international. How hard is it to wait a few minutes to find a wifi signal before placing that call to India? Vonage does not try to hose you on India calls - something normal like 17c pm. Yes, I could wait till my laptop is up and working and use Skype for free as long as my partner is set up at the same time.

I am dubious about investing in Vonage, although I may appreciate them as a customer. Anybody know any good public stocks to ride this one?

Nokia tests Unlicensed Mobile Access phone technology
7/28/2006 8:12:14 AM, by Ryan Paul

Nokia launched yesterday its very first public test of Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA), an innovative mobile communications technology that facilitates seamless handover between WiFi and cell networks…

(link)

grz brskby

The voice networks aren’t currently packet dominated, and thus not the current economically-favored voice call method, but they will be.

People don’t do much heavy wireless uploading, but they will.

My current Verizon evdo phone is fast enough for the kinds of uses I have today on that phone, that I NEVER use the wi-fi. Sure, if you’re going to upload your photos from the phone, higher speeds are essential, but the limited software and small-screen interface on the phone is going to make me wait get to the desktop anyway, not to mention the fact that I almost always want to manipulate, downsize, etc the photos anyway, done on the desktop.

Has anyone here actually tried a Skype call on Pocket PC? You might reach the person you’re trying, but they’ll hang up since they can’t hear you. But it will get there.

By the time the factors come in to place for a compelling handheld experience– a more solid handheld computer, 3G, 4G WiMax or whatever– we’ll see how dominant or relevant WiFi still is.

-Ken

I was able to get my E70 to make incoming and outgoing calls via the online PBX provider pbxes.com. I was amazed that it worked the first time…and I didn’t have to configure an Asterisk server at all! You do have some initial configuration to work through, but there are plenty of forum posts that give you all the info you need. It’s not plug-n-play, but it’s a LOT simpler than an Asterisk server. And I’m hoping this wifi functionality will fill the gap in the E70’s lack of 850mhz reception as well as T-mobile’s abyssmal coverage in eastern Long Island, the Colorado Rockies, and a few other areas I frequent. If I’m somewhere where I can hop on to a wifi network, I’ve now got mobile coverage!

It will remain a fiction unless -

Usability:
Its very surprising to me that while discussing the future adoption of a particular technology, we miss the most important parameter of the equation: The customers!
Mobile phone manufacturers and service provider need to fix the state of the standards and then deploy those solutions to fix the fix the usability problem.
The reason I love circuit switch voice is because I don’t have to select/configure the name of the Base station that I need to make my next voice call.

Quality of Service:
We all know the current state of QOS in wired VOIP. Just add the mobility/hand-over/and battery issues and you have got yourself, one very unhappy customer. I personally don’t call friends and family with VOIP phones.

Coverage:
So what if major US metros are fully covered with wifi hotspots, what about the rest of the world?

We tried several brands of wi-fi only phones and the battery life on all of them is much like that of a 1995 cell phone. For some reason the wi-fi phone makers have not found 2006 level batteries for their phones. Why is this?

It’s not the battery, it’s the WiFi. Since 1995, cellphone standards developers have spent a lot of time and energy developing techniques in the air interface to maximize cellphone battery life. WiFi isn’t there yet - the design assumption was that the client device would be a laptop with a larger power budget than a handheld device like a phone, so less attention was paid to optimizing the radio technology for client device power consumption. Standards have started to emerge lately to rectify this (yes, the pun was intentional - I’m an electrical engineer by background), but they’re not widespread yet.

Dual-mode phones are principally about providing cheaper coverage either at the user’s home, or the user’s office. Everything else is tangential, as these are the two key environments for usage in which it “should” be possible to leverage existing infrastructure (broadband at home, LAN in the office) to deliver voice, using VoIP, more cheaply. This benefits both the service provider (whether that’s the carrier or a 3rd party) and the end-user.

The main question is whether the WiFi bit is the same “service” as your main outdoor carrier, or whether its controlled by you the user (or your IP-PBX), or a third party service provider. Generally in the business environment it will be non-carrier, and in domestic settings it will be a hybrid fixed/mobile service provider.

WiFi setup and authentication will suck until there is a standard and roaming fees have been negotiated between all the major providers - T-Mobile, Wayport, Boingo. Don’t hold your breath, as this is a two-step process. Think SMS interoperability, data roaming on wireless today (… there was one?), IM interop and so on.

EarthLink will soon be the biggest hotspot operator of them all (and assume EarthLink will probably buy Boingo, as Sky started Boingo and Sky still sits on the board of EarthLink) and could exert some pressure on the other hotspot operators to play nicely. The one useful thing EarthLink/SKT’s Helio can do other than lose hundreds of millions will be to build a WiFi phone that uses EarthLink muni WiFi/Boingo authentication. But then, will Sprint or Verizon really be excited about letting this Alien spawn ride on their networks? I don’t think so…

The carriers are studying VOIP, trying to figure out how to crush it or co-opt it for as long as possible. They’ll really only play if they’re dragged kicking and screaming by WiFi only phones starting to see real uptake and usage. If the carriers wanted to promote Cellular/VOIP phones there would be great services out there today as the technology exists.

The first real use of combo WiFi/Cell phones will be at home or in the Enterprise. Need not even have fancy intra-call switching technology, just a simple ’strongest available signal’ algorithm. Combine this with ‘VOIP Call Forwarding’ available from landline VOIP (where you hand out your VOIP number, simul-ring your cell phone and perform human least cost routing by picking up whichever device you happen to be near) and the loss of cellular MOU starts to hurt…

Furthermore, analyses indicate potential voice capacity gains for voip relative to WCDMA bearer channels, even though it is too early to tell exactly what the gains may be.

One thing for certain is VoIP will bring other benefits, such as a consolidated IP core network for operators and sophisticated multimedia voice applications for users.

I found this post on connecting for VOIP through Asterisk on the E61 - (link)

rock on!

JG

1) You will NEVER see economically viable VOIP over cellular. And I don’t care if it’s EVDO, or the descendent of EVDO. The key issue is that the voice part of the cellular network is highly efficient in terms of its use of bandwidth. EVDO will never be able to offer a VOIP call for less than the marginal cost of putting that call on the current cellular voice infrastructure. It may be technically possible, but would never make sense economically.
2) Om is right, the key problem with Wifi, especially when we are referring to non-PC devices, is that the authentication and setup procedures are painful and difficult. Glenn is also right in his comment that people are working on this problem and it will get better over time. This is a software issue, and it’s much easier to solve than a physical constraint.
3) Speaking of physical constraints, don’t expect for everyone to have the same wonderful EVDO experience that OM is having. Traditional cellular networks have very large cells (around 1 square mile). As more and more users come on line in your same cell, performance will degenerate linearly (you can find a warning of this in the user agreement, along with restrictions on high-speed activities like video streaming, file sharing, and, oh yeah, VOIP). And we are talking about “sharing” only 700K per channel. Enjoy it while you can. There is another reason you will never VOIP over EVDO – it’s extremely asymmetric (once again the bigger cell causing a problem). Upload speeds are not fast enough for 2-way communication.
4) Lastly, several comments in this posting ignore the innovations happening in city-wide Wifi. These networks are highly symmetric (due to smaller cells), they do have the performance to support VOIP, they do support node-to-node handoff (at least the Tropos nodes do), and most importantly they are not limited to a “hotspot”. Om is right, device connectivity will suck for he near future. We need standards on these fronts. But, once again, the limitations are software issues, not physical ones. Watch Mountain View.

I’m currently testing a T-Mobile wifi/cellular phone. It has worked well with some minor glitches, motsly dropped calls when switching from the Wifi to cellular networks. I don’t know if this will be their business model in the future, but while testing all my calls made over the wifi network are ‘free’ and do not account towards my monthly minutes. There are still some kinks to work out but I see lots of utility to this product–especially for businesses. You could be wifi at very reduced or free minutes while in the office but then have access to cellular networks as you are out and about without changing phones or phone numbers…