Voice over WiFi - is this a solution?

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Making Wi-Fi Work

Being a supporter of UMA technology, I was glad to see the post on T-Mobile's HotSpot@Home service which is indeed based on UMA. I wanted to make two comments:

First, while T-Mobile is certainly the largest and most influential operator to roll with UMA, Cinci Bell actually soft-launched service just a few weeks ago. http://umatoday.blogspot.com/2007/05/cincinnati-bell-gets-it-right.html . UMA is a GSM technology, immediately excluding VZW and Sprint.

Second, battery performance on handsets with VoIP clients (non-UMA) will always be sub-optimal for two reasons. One is that "after market" voip clients can't actually perform all the power saving functions required to really optimize power. Most phones are locked and controlled such that user applications can't make low level calls into the phone's OS. Second, many VoIP applications rely on codecs that aren't in the phone. Therefore, the codec needs to run in costly (from MIPS and power) user application space. The result is an extreme power draw for compressing voice into G723 or whatever the preferred codec is.

UMA, as an embedded technology, overcomes these issues. It is integrated right into the phone's OS so it can perform millisecond timings to turn radios on/off for power savings. Also, UMA uses the GSM AMR codec and leverages the highly optimized mobile processor to perform the compression, again preserving battery.

For more information on UMA, check out UMAToday.blogspot.com.

Posted by: Steve Shaw   Posted on: 05/29/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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