Phones And Skype Get Together 119
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC has a look at some of the interesting gadgets that will be available for purchase now that Skype has published instructions on how to build the service into phones." From the article: "We saw one other innovative product at CES that is definitely worth a Skype addict's consideration. The Skype Wi-Fi phone, coming this March from Netgear, is basically a Skype cell phone. It connects to any wireless network, letting users make Skype calls completely unconnected to a PC or phone line. If it works as well as it appeared to when Netgear CEO Patrick Lo demonstrated it during a press conference by calling Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom, the little service from Luxembourg will have officially escaped from the confines of the personal computer."
Picture and info (Score:5, Informative)
Old news (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Any sip account (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.utstar.com/Solutions/Handsets/WiFi/ [utstar.com]
or
http://www.vocera.com/ [vocera.com] (star trek - like)
or
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/ZyXEL+P2000W [voip-info.org]
All are wifi SIP phones and work well with Asterisk
Skype and linux? (Score:3, Informative)
Skype, wake me up when you have fixed the audio bug, otherwise go to the DOGS
Re:Skype and windows? (Score:2, Informative)
Small EU Country Always = Luxembourg? (Score:3, Informative)
I keep seeing comments that Skype is "Luxembourg-based". Skype's legal headquarters are (were, pre-Ebay?) based in Luxembourg for tax reasons, but just about nothing else is as far as I understood it. Estonians wrote the code, and it's touted as a big success story in Estonia. The co-founders are a Swede and a Dane. Newsweek might see minimal legal headquarters as being the basis to call it its base, but from a Slashdot readership's perspective, you'd think you'd want to know where the developers are, and what they're doing now.
It's probably safest to say "EU-based". But I think Estonia at least needs a nod.
skype LD & 411 free (Score:3, Informative)
Just passing this along the information superhighway.
Re:Free as in idiot? (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, free healthcare is provided by the government and therefore by taxpayers, but so is anything "free" like tarmac roads, schools and sanitation.
Free internet access (taxpayer funded or otherwise) IS something to aim for, but NOT at the expense of healthcare or anything else - who suggested it was? Not me, that's for sure.
Use with WiFi hotspots (Score:3, Informative)
These wireless handsets, as has been previously pointed out, have been available for SIP networks for quite some time, along with decent wired handsets which also don't require a PC to be switched on. One good (albeit expensive) wireless SIP phone is the Hitachi WIP-5000 which has regular firmware updates including support for new features like WPA.
The main drawback with most of these phones, though, is not just the lack of support for new security standards like WPA (many, like the skype phone, support WEP only). The biggest problem, at least here in the UK (I dunno if it's different elsewhere), is that most of the wi-fi hotspot providers do not run encryption at all. Instead, they have an open network but require you to login through a webpage, in order to bill you. This technology is fine for laptops and PDAs with web browsers but makes such phones utterly useless* except when you're at home or you're lucky enough to have a workplace which supports standard wi-fi.
I'm sure someone will come up with a wifi sip phone with a browser eventually (Nokia's new E-series supports wi-fi, so that's promising) but, at the moment, the handsets are very expensive and not being able to use them at most UK wifi hotspots is a major drawback.
Sam.
* In theory, you could clone the MAC address to a laptop, sign in with that and then swop to the phone, but that's obviously far too much hassle for real usage.
Re:Calls using "Wi-Fi phones" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Calls using "Wi-Fi phones" (Score:3, Informative)
On a related note: Skype doesn't seem to care much about optimizing their software. I'm sometimes calling a friend who has a G4 600 Mhz and he told me that whenenver he is having a conversation Skype consumes more than 80% of the CPU power... It's not that bad with older versions of Skype btw.
Too few frequencies (Score:3, Informative)
Personal example: I live in an urban area, and there are already a ton of problems with too many 802.11b setups running on the same channels. Given that there are really only three totally independent channels (where you don't get overlap), it's quite easy to have an area where you should have service, but don't because of collisions between networks.
When my internet at home went down a few weeks ago (due to an unfortunate incident involving a squirrel, and a lot of incompetence on the part of Comcast) I tried to use one of the fifteen or so networks that were being reported by my computer as being in range. I couldn't get a connection on a single one -- they were all piled onto Chans. 1, 6, and 11, and all around the same strength, and when trying to connect to one I'd just get strength figures that jumped between 50% and 0%.
The WiFi bands were not set up with wide-area service in mind. Especially the original 802.11b, which is what you'd want to use for a commercial/free-internet service, because it's most compatible with existing equipment -- that 2.4GHz band was set aside for low-power, Part 15 devices, not broadcast. There's no governing authority to coordinate frequencies and channels and do interference mitigation, and there's overlap from other services as well.
This idyllic picture of free WiFi for everyone, everywhere, is going to come to a screaming halt in any metro area or suburbs where there are a lot of existing equipment installs, especially ones operated by people who don't even know what they're doing or how to change their system from the default channel. The fact that some company is giving you free internet on Channel x isn't going to matter if both your neighbors have their own gateways running on the same channel. At best it's going to cause a lot of collisions and degrade service, at worst it will interrupt it completely. As more and more devices become WiFi enabled, this is going to become a bigger problem.
My suggestion would be to get more frequencies -- lots more. The obvious choices would be the old analog cellular bands and the UHF television spectrum, but fat chance on either of those. We see spectrum, the FCC sees money in the bank (or in the budget, same thing). I have no doubt that we'll get "everwhere access" to the Internet -- it just won't be free; it'll be provided by your friendly cellular company at a stiff monthly charge and with a service contract.
Under the current system, they're going to be the ones who get the bandwidth and frequency allocations necessary for wide-area, interference-free service; the rest of us will be stuck in the crowded electromagnetic ghettos that are the ISM bands, trying to scream to each other over the din of everyone else's transmissions.
Re:Any sip account (Score:4, Informative)
No need to have a SIP service (which may/not gateway into your asterisk box).
Re:Any sip account (Score:2, Informative)
Because there are good customizable SIP products such as Asterisk, you can do much more. For instance, my Asterisk server at home has a "firewall" (caller screening), voicemail during the night hours, blocking of callers without caller ID (goes to voicemail), waiting music, hooks for shellscripts (sends me SMS at some events), queues et cetera. I don't see Skype offering a scripting engine, so Skype's limited to the advanced features they are willing to implement.
Second, the Skype protocol locks you in to their service. If you go with SIP, you can choose from various SIP providers. This enables competition, as you can "shop" for the cheapest deals. For instance, I get my incoming landline calls through a dutch service which offers a "prepaid" dial-in number, with credits that don't time out like Skype does. This party is a bit more expensive for outgoing phone calls, so I route my outgoing calls through sipdiscount.com who offer free landline calls to many countries. If they are unstable, I can simply choose another SIP proxy. If Skype is down, you are out of luck.
With SIP, regardless of your SIP provider choice, if you have a static IP address or dynamic DNS name, you can always accept free calls from any peer on the Internet. You'll always be able to make Internet calls for free and nobody can take that away from you.
One problem of SIP is that it doesn't work with NAT easily; you have to have some UDP ports open, which many common home routers don't allow. At the other hand Skype seemed to work instantly behind a NAT.
Re:Question: (Score:3, Informative)
In the case of phone numbers, most people already have the whitelist idea and apply it by being careful about who they give their phone numbers to.
That's not sufficient, though. Telemarketing was pretty bad a few years ago -- not as bad as e-mail spam, but much worse than it is now -- and it's gotten better primarily because of regulation. Telemarketers are not allowed to call cellphones at all, for obvious reasons, and the do-not-call registry (the national one, plus the various state lists and the list managed by the Direct Marketer's Association before that) have made it fairly easy to avoid excessive calls on land lines. Before the regulations were in place, though, it was pretty common to get three or four calls per evening.
Whitelisting by being selective about who you give your contact info to doesn't work, not without some help. Most people are selective about who they give their e-mail addresses to, also, and that clearly doesn't work.
Explicit whitelisting has the serious downside that it tends to eliminate desirable contact from people who you just haven't gotten around to whitelisting (perhaps because you didn't know you wanted to). Even if you're willing to accept that, you still have the problem of how to know who it is who's contacting you. VOIP already provides caller ID, but caller ID is easy to spoof, both for VOIP systems and for traditional phone lines as well. VOIP spammers don't necessarily have any more reason to provide a valid "FROM" header than they do with e-mail.
The solution is, first, to find a way to make sure that people *know* who is calling them. SPF is an approach to do that (in part) for e-mail, and there's a comparable proposal for SIP that is an IETF draft standard.
Once you can trust the caller ID, then you can screen calls or, even better, use a "buddy list" system like Jabber does, where you can cold-contact anyone you want, but you don't actually get through to them until they decide to allow it. If they decide to allow it, however, you're whitelisted until they decide to remove you.
Also, with trustworthy caller ID, you can build reputation systems -- blacklists, in the simplest form. Your VOIP phone can check the caller ID not only against your whitelist, but also against some public blacklist server. If that ID has accumulated enough complaints, as recorded by the blacklist server, then your phone may not even bother notifying you of the connection request.
There's other stuff that can be done as well, but it all rests on having caller ID that actually works. That's what we *don't* have for e-mail (at present). But we can, and should, build it into the new VOIP infrastructure.