My comrades , welcome to the bang-up daylight of the grand unification ! At last , all information will flow through the glorious Unity Pipeline to our homes and businesses ! No more atrocious decisions that lease country aside , forced crony against brother , in choosing divine service plan !
As you all well recall , the Great Sundering of the eighties was finally made right on the first day of the New Devolution , which we number from Dec. 29 , 2006 , starting as Year 1 A.T. ( ante telephonum ) . bare daylight later come the birth of the Perfect machine , what our beloved Jobs , may he be blessed in our remembering , call the iPhone .
Today , the final pieces are in place . Our broadband information run at a brilliant trillion fleck per second , and our telephony — sorry , telepathy , it ’s so easy to slip into the old language — works wherever we are with every other human being . Not like there ’s a choice . And we can receive 501 television receiver channels ! Such advances .
Let us raise our iPhone 9.0 ’s to the sky , and bow our head in praise of AT&T&T , our Great American Telephone & Telegraph & Telepathy overlord .
OK , perhaps I overdraw …
While the future may not turn over out quite to be the dystopian vision I limn above , there ’s a juggernaut of momentum towardconvergence — the combining of different kind of services into one lump , one bill , and one company offering it . The iPhone , herald by Steve Jobs in January and shipping this June , fits neatly into the raw AT&T ’s strategy in that attentiveness .
Convergence as a broad term distinguish how vocalisation and video are becoming just one more kind of data service , not alone services that need separate wires and equipment that ’s handled differently than uncoiled broadband . With a single cable to your home — whether phone telegram , coaxal cable , or a character - optic strand — you could already get what formerly required three unique connection , if not more .
lease ’s walk through what AT&T is attempting , what other U.S. and external firms have already deployed , and where the iPhone fit out in .
Voice , by whatever means potential
no matter of what we do n’t get it on yet about the iPhone ’s full range of features , we know it is a phone , and one of its most frequent economic consumption will be placing call .
Cell phone user ’ top complaint is reportage within their family . While drome , conference centre , colleges , and hotels have cut deals with cell carriers to put little antennas within their structures — in many cases , the cell carriers pay a sizeable fee for the privilege — so far , our home plate remain static - fill up voids .
But X of meg of households in the U.S. and hundreds of one thousand thousand worldwide have Wi - Fi networks backed by broadband cyberspace connexion . Could n’t those meshing be leveraged ? you may buy IP phones that work over Wi - Fi , some of which now supportSkypedirectly . However , those services are sovereign of other voice offering you may have . If you cut the electric cord entirely and switch to a wideband phone servicing provider such asVonage , you still need a disjoined fluid plan .
The iPhone has Wi - Fi built in , but it ’s unclear if any third - political party developers will have the opportunity to write add - on software package for the iPhone to take advantage of it . That would depart Skype mighty out unless Skype ’s parent troupe , eBay , discover a pot . It also think of all other VoIP tools could be off boundary — include iChat AV .
What AT&T will in all likelihood embrace , perhaps with the iPhone being the first machine to be part of the plan , is fixed - Mobile River convergency ( FMC ) , which is the uniting of telephone systems that are fixed ( through a landline or wired broadband service in the menage ) and mobile , as with cellular internet .
In an FMC internet , you have a single French telephone or mobile twist , a single notice , and a predicable set of charges for use . One of the earliest forms is roll in the hay as unaccredited mobile admission ( UMA ) , and is already in use byT - Mobilein limited mart in the United States andBT(formerly British Telecom ) in the UK .
With UMA , a handset has both a cellular radio and an “ unlicenced ” wireless , the unlicensed referring to how Wi - Fi , Bluetooth , and other standards can apply some frequency bands worldwide without limitation . UMA typically apply Wi - Fi .
In a UMA plan , a Wi - Fi web is just another cell tower , and you’re able to place calls whether the handset is connected to your carrier ’s web via cellular signals or Wi - Fi . The phone is invariably scanning for cellular telephone and Wi - Fi connections to earmark handoffs . If you walk or drive out of ambit of one case , the French telephone seamlessly swop you over to the other type without flatten the call .
In T - Mobile ’s former U.S. rollout , available at this writing for sign - up only in Washington nation , you have to pay up for at least a $ 40 - per - month voice plan to qualify for the UMA divine service , which they commercialize asHotSpot@Home ; and a especial UMA handset .
you’re able to use Wi - Fi proceedings from the voice pool , or , for $ 20 more per month , get unlimited calling over Wi - Fi . That includes any calls that come out on Wi - Fi networks , but excludes any that start on cell internet . you could hang up when you get home and place a Modern call , of course . ( For household architectural plan , T - Mobile part at $ 50 for the cell plan for two lines and charge $ 20 per month for unlimited Wi - Fi on the first line and $ 5 per calendar month for additional line . )
T - Mobile also has 7,000 live spots at Starbucks , aerodrome , and other locations , from which unlimited Wi - Fi call may be made . They trust to leverage their service with users who journey or frequent those spots .
This plan let T - Mobile keep customers who make a lot of claim or who simply require well response in their base . T - Mobile even offers a subsidized Wi - Fi router with two special features : one move over voice packets high priority than other datum ( Wireless Multimedia or WMM ) ; the other Lashkar-e-Taiba compliant handsets habituate much less ability by want less unneeded communication when no data point is flowing ( WMM Power Save ) .
For outside exploiter who can get broadband in their home , a cell connection may not even act upon , but they ’d be able to place Wi - Fi calls with aplomb . ( Industry estimates pegleg VoIP calls over Wi - Fi as cost about a cent a minute ; jail cell calls be more like a nickel note a second . So T - Mobile salve money , on mean , for each Modern Wi - Fi substance abuser while gaining loyalty . )
AT&T ’s leg up
The disadvantage to T - Mobile ’s offer is that the timber of voice call option over Wi - Fi can be just as expert or poor as Vonage or Skype , as T - Mobile offer no wireline broadband for sale in the U.S. HotSpot@Home — and any regular VoIP serve — has to have its vocalization mail boat fade over whatever provider ’s web you use and the Internet at large before hand a gateway that puts the information out into the even phone web .
This irregular itinerary is why one Vonage call can be marvellous and the next submarine sandwich - par . It ’s also been a bone of contention over net disinterest : there ’s plenty of suspicion that carriers and cable television service operators have purposely degraded VoIP overhaul that top over their networks .
The iPhone already has Wi - Fi and mobile phone . AT&T could take baby steps , offering Wi - Fi call under a separate design , standardised to Vonage . But UMA is largely a matter of software ; any computer hardware engineering could already be build into the iPhone . Nokia , Motorola , and Samsung all have UMA handset being sold by T - Mobile or BT , so the technology is already well understood .
Everything on one gadget
The next footprint beyond converged career is convergence of all twist . The noble-minded vision that Cingular spell out before the AT&T ’s BellSouth acquirement — and one that Verizon Wireless has aver it ’s following — is one in which every twist is internet agnostic . ( Technically , it ’s shout IMS or IP Multimedia System , and no two human beings on the planet define it identically . )
For instance , if you ’re carrying a suspiciously small , touch - sensitive video player — a extroverted twist made by a company found in Cupertino , Calif. , say — you could be watching cyclosis , on - demand telecasting while free a train home from oeuvre using the on - board Wi - Fi now showing up on many transit system .
As you get off the train , the gadget switches , without noticeable stammer , to the high - speed cell connection . The quality of the video drops down as does the audio , but it does n’t shake off . You take the air home , your eyes still lock on the cover , and you step in the door , plump this mystery gimmick in a sorrel attached to your mellow - definition television , and the inspection and repair switch over to the 50 Mbps fiber connection to your domicile , and the video go on , but now in 1080p with 5.1 environment phone .
Sounds crazy , no ? It ’s not really that far out : each element is already promptly available — several cadre companies bid stream video;MobiTVhas boob tube over Wi - Fi red-hot spots ; and all incumbents are crowd out boob tube over fiber optic .
The real inquiry is whether people are willing to glom up with a single carrier for the so - called quadruplex play of voice , video / TV , broadband , and mobile from one society . The hope is cheaper and good ; the company themselves economise a low fortune in billing and client retentivity that they can pass along a portion of to the home user .
Closing thoughts
Will the iPhone become the Unity gimmick of the future tense ? There ’s real potential . AT&T is wire character - optic lines to neighbourhood control points across its territorial dominion , in the hopes of extradite a competition to cable and satellite TV — it own the largest peregrine carrier in the US ; it own more landlines than any other toter ; and it has more DSL customer than any other carrier .
iPhone could be something so far beyond what look to be the cool gadget ever plan by Apple and used for telephone . It could actually be the first gimmick to fulfill the hope of intersection — the first gadget , that is , that has n’t appeared exclusively in TV ads show a resplendent future .
