Do we REALLY need a phone?

kenneth marken k-marken at online.no
Sun Apr 20 15:39:34 CEST 2008


On Sunday 20 April 2008 15:14:58 ramsesoriginal wrote:
> 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.
>

i guess it depends on how high priority the communication has in the "senders" 
mind. sms is very much a "when you have time" kind of system. im steps it up 
a notch via its presence system. and a phone call is very much a "drop 
everything else, NOW!" way of communicating.

> >  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.
>

ah yes. i forgot about all that. and yes, it would be quite the solution.

now that i think about it i have been pondering converting email into xmpp, 
given the recent interest in push email and all that...

as in, why use multiple protocols when one can use one?

> >  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..
>

indeed. but i cant say i have kept up to speed on recent developments. this is 
only something i picked up from wikipedia and similar sources, so...

> >  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
>

hmm, pcmcia or expresscard? i recall early ipaq pdas had a sleeve for those 
kinds of addons that allowed the humble pda to access wifi and gsm networks. 
added quite a bit of bulk tho.

and was not a similar sleeve system bounced around for the neo? primarily for 
use with wifi?

>
> [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP





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