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> £20/month - VoIP?
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It's now technically possible and it could be massive.
I know it works because I had it working over Oranges free pay as you go GPRS but there was too much delay.
You could:
- call most countries landlines for free
- text unlimited for free
- generally escape the anticompetitive networks
So what's happened?
3G have brought down data access to £20/month for 100mb for Businesses. This was the only application people were really interested in and they've finally started giving people what they want.
However, access to the internet now means that we now get access to VoIP and online text message services.
My VoIP provider gives me free national calls and calls to mobiles are ~4p. 0870 is 7p.
Drawbacks:
1) At the moment to do this easily you'd have to lug around a laptop. However, given a 3G smartphone with VoIP software and some customisation you could in thoery get calls as easy to make as standard calls. The way forward here would be with a linux 3G phone that hasn't been deliberately sabotaged to prevent software customisation (i.e. deliberate lack of documentation)
2) Perhaps 3G isn't going to take off. That means that EDGE or UMTS will come into play and do we know if these are latent? -because you can't make calls if they are.
3) Coverage. 3G coverage is limited and you'd have to consider that to get your £20's worth.
4) My VoIP costs me 2kb/sec max so that's plenty of calls before you get to 100mb but it's not unlimited
5) Maybe it's just too good, they just won't like it and will try to block it
The major thing blocking progress is the closed nature of most phones. Given a linux based phone you could route your calls to your computer over bluetooth and over VoIP automatically when in range. You could even scan for WIFI networks too. Unfortunately we had to make floAt and GNUBox just to begin to comprehend this sort of thing.
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Posted: 2006-03-08 17:18:05
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