Do we REALLY need a phone?

ramsesoriginal ramsesoriginal at gmail.com
Sun Apr 20 15:14:58 CEST 2008


On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 2:51 PM, kenneth marken <k-marken at online.no> wrote:
> 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.
>
As far as I can see it, sms is way more used then calling in the
private field, but calling is more used in the buisness field.

>  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.
>
XMPP (ex Jabber) [1] gives the possibity through so-called "gateways"
to talk to other services. I for example talk through jabber to my
friends in icq, in msn and in yahoo talk. But, like the article says,
xmpp has even the possibility to combine im and sms. Having such a
system on a phone shure makes sms obsolete.

>  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.
>
That's really true. And sad. But a system like the one used by XMPP,
just in the voip field (I think even XMPP is going that way), would
really make the pstn obsolete. And even more: voip has often the
possibility to make calls to pstn and recive calls from it: so if a
phone is equipped with a gien voip system fine, else you simply call
the pstn network through the voip system.

>  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.
>
I don't know about this, but it sounds intresting..

>  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?

That's often the question, and if companies like OpenMoko become
known, the possibility of having an Open Source implementation also
grow.


I also would say that I don't know about Stefano, but i thought of
this as a modular system when I read this mail: If you feel the need
for gsm you put in the gsm module, if you think oyu need 4g you put in
that chip, and if you think you need something else, then simply use
something else. Doing this way you, for know, you simply creatre the
gsm module. Then you create some 4g module, and people can buy it,
upgrade their "phone", put it in a new barebone system, or whatever
they want. Having a modular approach gives true freedome, in my
opinion


[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP
-- 
My corner of the web: http://blog.ramsesoriginal.org




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