Do we REALLY need a phone?

[kenneth marken]

On Sunday 20 April 2008 14:23:26 Stefano Cavallari wrote:
>
> You can potentially use less bandwidth if you choose more intelligent
> codecs. And yes I'm for paying actual bandwidth for mobile Internet.
> The Internet doesn't mean necessarily broadband and flat prices.
> And remember that IM is way more efficient (both from the human and the hw
> point of view) and cheap than VoIP, so many people would just switch to IM.
> It's because of absurd SMS costs and size limits that few uses them.
>

my impression is that sms is used far more then phone calls here in norway for 
quick and simple communications.

im systems have the problem that they are just that, systems. sure, one could 
use jabber as a glue, but most of my contacts are on msn, not jabber. and in 
other parts of the world its aol and yahoo messenger that counts.

same deal with voip systems. the most popular is skype, but thats a closed 
system. as in, the only client that can access it is the official, closed 
source client.

so when going from current systems to voip and im (and current voip clients 
can often double as voip clients, or the other way round) your just pushing 
the abstraction back a step.

oh, and isnt the "4G" LTE system thats supposed to take over for UMTS at some 
point in the future planned as a IP based system? as in, any voice calls 
performed will be done via voip anyways. its just that the handsets and the 
network operators have agreed on a common standard.

question is, will said voip standard be implementable in open source ways. or 
are the controls required by the telcos so stringent (for fear of someone 
finding a way to shut the system down) that only big corps can do it in a 
black box fashion?