Motorola Plans Wi-Fi Cell Phones

Otto writes "This AP article over at CNN talks about Motorola's plans to create a cell phone that can seemlessly switch calls between cell networks and VoIP over WiFi, when it sees WiFi available to it. Thus reducing on call costs. Personally, I think it'd be cool just to have a cell phone that could use my own WiFi at home and be cellular when I'm out in the rest of the world."

this is /.....

[andrewleung]

you really think this would get much time "in the rest of the world"? ha!

just get a good old wifi phone and you'll never know the difference.

wifi phones from pulver.com [pulverinnovations.com]

Re:Finally! A way to escape the at-home dead zone!

[LostCluster]

Hopefully this would finally be a way to escape the "at-home dead zone" when I try and use my mobile down in the basement and I can get rid of that silly land-line once and for all!

Cell providers already have "mini tower" equipment they can set up in their stores to assure that they never have an embarassing dead spot at their own retail location. They even set those up at business sites to assure an otherwise uncoverable corperate campus gets hit with signal.

I guess it was only a matter of time until they converted such units to a home game model...

Re:Where are they?

[homer_ca]

It's actually not that hard to find a T-mobile hotspot. There's a Starbucks practically on every block. The cost savings argument doesn't make sense though. $30 a month is only $5 less than my cell phone plan. Also, you'll still need a paid VoIP account (about $20 a month) to call regular phones, otherwise you'll only be able to call other IP phones.
Free hotspots are harder to find. In my neighborhood there's one at the food court at the mall and another one at a fast food restaurant. Plenty of unsecured wireless APs on my street too, but the CF Wifi card on my PDA is too weak to connect to them.

Dual Mode Phones FYI

[TheOtherKiwi]

Just FYI, Ericsson and others have had dual-mode DECT/GSM phones since the late 90's and adoption has not been spectacular.

These phones allow you to roam indoors on a DECT local digital connection to your landline and roam outside (or in large buildings) with seamless handover between DECT base stations. They also doubled as GSM but I don't think the handover was automatic, see:

http://www.dectweb.com/Products/dual_mode.htm

Toy

[Anonymous Coward]

This kind of device is useless without a widely adopted standard for sharing internet access automatically. Wifi doesn't support roaming between APs who are controlled by different entities, the cells (of coverage) are miniscule, ENUM isn't ready for primetime and there's no working and vendor-independent QoS standard yet. Some of these problems can be solved (and will be solved real-soon-now), but others are inherent to the wireless lan concept.

Re:Toy

[Anonymous Coward]

Power consumption is bad, but not that bad: Wifi CF-cards [cewindows.net]

Re:woohoo

[EchoMirage]

*cough* GSM?

Cracked. [narod.ru]

Re:War Phoning?

[Anonymous Coward]

In some places, it's a crime merely to connect to a network without permission, and that could reasonably apply to a phone that just happens to seek out any open wifi connections as you walk down the street.

The law views it as if the street had a bunch of houses each with a gated yard. Open the gate and step in the yard (connect) and you've trespassed. Open gate, step in yard, enter the house (transmit something over their network), and you've commited a computer crimes felony.

As well as probably stepped in some dog poo.

Thanks, Motorola, but I really don't need a phone hell bent on sending me to jail.

Re:Finally! A way to escape the at-home dead zone!

[Technician]

I guess it was only a matter of time until they converted such units to a home game model...

A simple passive repeater is no problem to install in a dead zone such as a basement.

A high gain antenna on the roof pointing to the cell tower is connected to an omni antenna in the basement. This provides signal in the dead zone.

A small dish works great as it can be pointed to the tower providing high signal strength to feed the basement antenna. Be sure to use antennas cut to the freuency your cell provider is using. Use a large diamater low loss cable or all system gains will be lost in the first 15 feet of the cable. In extreme cases, eliptical waveguide may be used but it greatly adds to the cost of the project. To prevent cable loss, keep the cable as short as possible. Many houses have high attenuation because of masonary walls or aluminum backed insulation in the walls. A roof mount dish coupled with about 6 feet of wire to a ceiling mounted antenna are sometimes all that is needed to couple the signal from outside into the living space covering even the basement with good signal.

Nokia 9500

[haunebu]

"Personally, I think it'd be cool just to have a cell phone that could use my own WiFi at home and be cellular when I'm out in the rest of the world."

There you go [nokia.com]. GPRS/EDGE when you're out and about, and Wi-Fi at your favorite hotspot.

for the lazy

[Rev Saxon]

Clicky [dectweb.com]

Wifi + VoIP to save on calls

[awehttam]

Or, setup an Asterisk box, get yourself a NuFone account and use E164.org [e164.org] to resolve pstn numbers to voip addresses over the Internet.

Set up Asterisk to try an EnumLookup [voip-info.org] first, then fall back to NuFone [nufone.net] or your home landline using a $16 X100P WinModem from DigitNetworks. [digitnetworks.com]

Get all your friends to register their phone numbers with E164.org too, it's a free ENUM service that also verifies people's numbers.

Then if you're really feeling groovy, help a local Community Wireless Network deploy an 802.11a backbone with 11g hotspots all over the place ;) [seattlewireless.net] Works great with Asterisk and serexpress. :)

Flarions' OFDM Wireless Broadband service

[Gaurang]

Making cell phones use WiFi might not be a very good choice, when people will start ceasing to have WiFi connections in the first place. Flarion [flarion.com] has come up with OFDM technology which provides real broadband speeds on wireless networks (scaleable to cellular networks level), much faster than forthcoming CDMA2000-EvDO (or whatever), and any other technology available in the forthcoming future. Nextel has already started a successful trial network [yahoo.com].

Wired WiFi services have limited life, it seems.

Re:Pointless Idea!

[16K Ram Pack]

Well, firstly, the 3G calls utilising video in the UK are darned expensive. Nearly $1 per minute.

Beyond 3G

[jameskstew]

The industry has been planning this for at least 5 years if not longer - most of the big technology companies and operators are working on network integration where the particular wireless access method is interchangeable. There are a vareity of business models, the primary one is the operator owns or leases access on GSM, 3G, DVB, DAB, WLAN networks and uses them to provide a range of multimedia services. Using a network management system they can move traffic between radio access systems to optimise bandwidth use. Another company peddling this technology is Calypso (http://www.calypsowireless.com [calypsowireless.com]).Nokia will bring out dual mode phones at the end of the year.The EC is funding a whole raft of project sin this area too. I have been working on a project to allow and exploit simultaneous use of multiple standards from one device (e.g. car, phone, laptop, home) (FLOWS [flows-ist.org]) This would allow not only seamless hand over, but switching of part of the communication onto differetn wireles system as conditions change. However the whole vision is a bit of an engineers dream: fixed line firms see it as a way into wireless market, individuals with WiFi base stations will want to use them for V0IP, MVNOs and third party service providers will increasingly push voice to a commodity business. WLAN has a strong trajectory of its own outside the convergence telcom path. There are definite US -Europe - Japan - China - rest of the world differences in how it will be implemented too.