Telecoms Announce "One Voice" Initiative To Promote LTE Wireless Broadband Stand 39
suraj.sun writes to mention that Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks may have just gotten a boost over WiMax in the battle for wireless broadband dominance. A group of telecom companies has created the "One Voice" initiative, designed to promote a standard that will provide interoperability for broadband voice and SMS. "LTE has been fine at supporting data, which uses IP-based packet switching. But it's faced challenges trying to incorporate traditional circuit-based switching voice and SMS services onto IP-based networks. One Voice is the group's attempt to resolve that issue. The new specification will use existing functionality known as IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which already defines how to provide data, voice, and other content over an IP-based network. IMS was established by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a group comprised of telecom industry associations trying to set standards for 3G mobile networks."
Some large companies are missing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:SMS on the Internet, efficiency issues. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, they have to keep up the whole SMS racket. If each SMS message went through as one IP packet, how could they charge $0.20 each?
Putting SMS on the Internet can be botched. though. Google just did it. Google Voice supports SMS send and receive. Google's site can be queried for SMS in XML and JSON. There's a Python library for this. [google.com] All this works. But Google's returned XML has so much useless dreck in it that each poll returns about 100K of data, even if there's no new SMS traffic. Thus, if you poll every 30 seconds and get no new messages, you use a quarter of a gigabyte a day of bandwidth just polling. So don't do that in an iPhone app to save on SMS charges.
Google needs to put Google Voice on something like RSS, where there's a way to cheaply poll to find out if anything changed. When polling RSS, you send back the ID from the previous poll reply. If you get a 304 status and no data, nothing changed. It would also help if they got the RSS implementation right. Some RSS servers return a new unique ID every time, even when nothing changed. (Twitter, I'm looking at you here.)
There are thus some widely used services which waste vast amounts of bandwidth trying to do by pull and poll what can be cheaply done by push.
Re:SMS on the Internet, efficiency issues. (Score:5, Interesting)
And if you poll, you'll consume so much battery that the iPhone won't make it through a working day. Seriously. In any mobile application (be it iPhone, Android, WebOS or other), you should not poll, and definitely not every 30 seconds, because you'll eat up battery in no time - the CPU and radios just suck power when you do. It's why Apple has the whole push notification deal - getting notified is far better on the battery than polling.
If GV requires this for SMS, then you as app developer should setup a notification server and do the polling there.
And SMS does require special handling since the target may not be awake when you need to push it out. You can't just send it to the phone, you have to send a wakeup to the phone first then send the packet out. In regular GSM, the control channel is what notifies the radio, and the radio handles all the SMS transfer. In IP based network, it may be pushed off onto the main processor to use its IP stack.
Re:SMS on the Internet, efficiency issues. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait wait wait...
Why are we talking polling with regard to the iPhone?
Iphone and android have push notifications. (Basically sleeping tCP/IP connections similar to Microsoft Active Sync.
You have a TCP connection is opened to the server, and if there is nothing to send the server just doesn't send anything, and the phone shuts down its transmitters.
In 12 to 18 minutes, if no traffic occures the connection times out and drops, the socket becomes readable to the phone, the phone wakes up and creates a new connection and goes back to sleep.
If the server has something to send it puts it on the TCP connection, the socket becomes readable to the phone, it wakes up and does what is necessary.
No polling, unless you count a brief arousal from its slumber once every 15 minutes or so to reestablish a socket as polling.
This technique is used for lots of things on the net such as imap idled an of course MS Active Sync with an exchange server. Its non-patentable, and Apple supplies the notification service for any application that cares to use it.