Graves On SOHO VoIP

This is a little off topic, but just so very interesting that I had to post it. Reading this mornings news I discovered that C-SPAN interviewed Marty Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone. You can see the entire 30 minute interview online. There’s a lot to learn from the piece, even about our current regulatory regime.

Thanks to Rob Jackson at Phandroid for pointing this out.

It’s been a while since I installed the little Portech MV-370 GSM gateway. It sits in the office IT stack and does what it does. When I’m traveling it lets me call home using my unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes. It also backs up our IP-based home & office phones. If both the Comcast Cable modem and Covad DSL are out the we can route calls out via T-Mobile.

The Gigaset cordless phones support enough accounts that this is easy, just add #6 to the number to specify dial using the GSM trunk. The GSM gateway is the 6th account on the Gigasets. We don’t even need a local Asterisk system to make it possible.

Remembering back to the installation of the GSM gateway, I converted my T-Mobile account from an individual plan to a family plan, with the gateway device becoming the second line on the account. I dropped my number of minutes but the monthly carrying cost was the same. It seems like a good idea since the use of mobile-to-mobile minutes to call home was going to reduce my need for minutes in the end.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul O’Flaherty released this curious little vidcast that makes a good point.

For months I’ve been waiting for a new cell phone. There seems to be a dearth of suitable candidates available. So I’m going to try running a reader poll. I had been very interested in the Nokia N97 which has been shipping for about six weeks. Yet few people I know are using the device, and I don’t necessarily trust everything that I read about it online. If you have one I’d like to know your thoughts on it.

 Loading ...

Feel free to leave a comment or suggest an alternative.

This is just brilliant! A great slice of the state of cellular, voice & mobile internet in a very approachable form. Fact filled and funny, too!

A short while ago Nir Simionovich noted an interesting new piece of hardware on his blog. It’s the embodiment of a novel approach to adding GSM based cellular trunks to an Asterisk server. As opposed to a freestanding external SIP-to-GSM gateway that I installed last year, someone has devised a new TDM-GSM module that emulates that FXO daughter card on a Digium TDM400P card. According to the companies web site two modules can be installed to a TDM400P card, providing Asterisk with two GSM trunks. No drivers are required beyond those loaded for the TDM400P.

Read the rest of this entry »

Someone over at Broadband Reports VoIP Forum has posted on successfully using IAX2 via a soft phone on a laptop tethered to a Blackberry Bold. This doesn’t seem like the most practical of approaches to mobile VoIP, but it’s certainly a neat experiment.

Truphone issued a couple of press releases today. The first release announces full interoperability of IM with MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and GoogleTalk in its iPod Touch and iPhone applications.  They have also integrated Twitter into the TruFriends view of the Truphone application.

In the case of GoogleTalk users can also make and receive voice calls using the Truphone application. Similar voice capability is in the work for users of MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger.

Read the rest of this entry »