Today the Experience has been started: I don't have a voice-capable cell phone plan anymore. Only SMS and data. All contacts have been notified. Let's see what happens now. My friends are calling me crazy.But of course I am not *that* crazy. My old cell phone number went to my wife, so anybody that knows the old number can still reach me, and people will keep it around for emergencies. My 3G chip can send and receive SMS, and SMS is 99% of cell phone communication these days. And it can do emergency calls.
It was a tough day to start with pure VoIP telephony. The Internet went down this afternoon, probably a telecom router problem. Since this town I live is very small, the cell phone provider probably relies on landline telecom for TCP/IP, and guess what, 3G went down too. Both came back up in 30 minutes. This night, we had thunderstorms, everything was shot down here, and then my father calls over Skype, with Fring connected via EDGE. And he is deaf. And my son was crying loud because of thunderbolts. Incredibly, he managed to understand what I was saying. The next call over restarted WLAN was much nicer :)
By the way, this week was plagued by Internet problems at all levels: from DSL provider to my corporated VPN to Freenode IRC, everyone goofed up a handful of times. Even my phone plug was loose on socket, what was probably costing me a higher packet loss rate and a DSL reconnection every 12 hours, whose cause I was chasing down this whole week.
As I mentioned in the last post, Skype gateway to POTS is in trouble in Brazil, since Transit Telecom has some problem with cell phone companies and interconnection rates. One says they charge too much, others say Transit is in default. I even got SkypeIn (now called Online Number) but it can not receive calls from Claro phones. Calling from/to fixed landlines, and/or calling from/to distant area cell phones works because in such cases the interconnection is made through other companies.
I must acknowledge my #d00dz friends in this point: telecom regulation in Brazil is a mess. ANATEL should never let this to happen; either they seize the offending telecom's control, or demand the others to lower rates. It is a completely stupid situation, having one POTS terminal not being able to call some POTS number because of misunderstandings between the respective companies.
That SkypeIn problem almost wrecked my plans, but then I remembered by old Vono account that I just created for testing. Vono is a SIP phone service with quasi-POTS quality because it is actually operated by a POTS company (GVT). This worked great right from the start, and worked with every possible client: SIP client applications, bundled SIP support in Nokia phones, and Fring SIP support.
I was going to abandon Fring in favor of using bundled SIP support in N85, but it seems to work only when connected via WLAN. It may be some configuration mistake, but could not make it work over 3G. It autenticated but did not make calls. When I tried to call, it said something like "no connection available". That forced me to use Fring SIP add-on, which has a bigger latency but works over 3G/EDGE.
It may well be that my 3G plan blocks SIP explicitly, or phone being crippled in software not support SIP over 3G. But I still hope to find a solution and use bundled Nokia SIP stack because it is said to be of very high quality, integrates with phone UI nicely (no need to navigate to a background application), and perhaps would consume less battery than Fring.
Running Fring is hard on battery; brand new N85 struggles to stay on 24 hours per charge, and that's with WLAN (which is said to consume less energy than 3G/EDGE). Probably I will need to make an habit of plugging the USB cable (N85 can trickle charge over USB). Actually, it was expected, and I am surprised it goes that far; N95 drains the battery in few hours just by being connected to WLAN.
Of course, "running Fring" is not the real culprit; the problem is the continuous WLAN connection. If a notebook stays up for half an hour longer when WLAN is off, imagine what WLAN does with a poor cell phone.
One nice side-effect of operating connected to network 100% of the time, is that GPS works incredibly fast, even indoors, thanks to A-GPS. (In this afternoon, when Internet was out, GPS took several minutes to lock, as usual.) By the way, N85's Map application is much nicer than N810 counterpart, despite the smaller screen.
N85 camera did a lot better outdoors in daylight, as the photo at the top of the post shows. I put that photo as N85's background image -- and now finally the OLED display can show off. The palm leaf just looks real and alive on N85, while it looks bleached out and dead in Macbook's screen (which has one of the best LCDs around, with LED backlight). OLEDs are really the way to go.
Time to go to bed, and plug the charger on N85 :)
2 comentários:
Here's a nickel kid, go buy yourself a real voice plan.
Your comments about Transit Transit Telecom are interesting. Over the past two years I have bought Salvador DIDs from third-party providers such as Inphonex and DIDWW that obviously partner with Transit Telecom to obtain numbers. Those numbers, which always begin in 3717- have always been problematic. Often when people called from cell phones they would get a message that the number didn't exist. This might happen sporadically, or for days on end.
Every time I contacted the companies that sold me the Salvador DIDs they would in turn contact Transit Telecom, which would then blame the problem either on me, or on all cellular companies--Vivo, Oi, Tim etc.
Transit Telecom would then say it was the customer's responsibility (as in "me") to contact all the cellular providers to resolve the problem because there was nothing wrongat their end.
Of course, if I tested with other Transit Telecom 3717 numbers in Salvador the same thing would happen. Inphonex, Mobivox, Jaxtr and other services use 3717 numbers in Salvador provided by Transit Telecom for local access to their services. They also often do not work when called from cell phones. That was the case two years ago and is still the case today.
It was quite apparent that Transit Telecom's blaming of cell companies was nonsense, and your post seems to confirm it.
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