The Washington Post today discusses the vast tracts of cellular advertising on their largely undifferentiated products.
Here's the money quote:
"I find the cell phone industry incredibly annoying," said Henrichsen, a mortgage broker who moonlights as a pianist and carries a bare-bones cell phone. "They put way more options [on] than a sane person would need."
Henrichsen said he admires the ads but thinks the money could be better spent: "I'd rather that they work harder not to drop my call on the parkway."
Now, if we had an end-to-end IP approach, the network would have no concept that he was making a phone call, and calls would never be dropped when he walking into an elevator or drove through a tunnel. You would come back into coverage and just keep on talking.
Underneath the hood, technologies like CDMA 1xRTT and GPRS/EDGE are fundamentally tied to a circuit-switched architecture. Even when you have a packet connection, it's still really dial-up: channels have to be set up and torn down, and that creates massive (5-10 second) latency. You can't build a meaningful VoIP architecture on those systems.
The first carrier to launch an mobile network with true VoIP will clean up. To learn more about OFDM and its competitors just take a look at the sites of Flarion, Navini, or IPWireless. The time-out before ending a call due to loss of signal will become a user preference in the handset. The next step after "Can you hear me now?" is "The talk never stops."
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:06 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/39