RunningWithBulls.com - The curse of Sanfermin

My Cubic Telecom WiFi/GSM phone arrived yesterday. Thank you Pat for sending one on to me. I promise I won’t drop it in the loo

Cubic Telecom, I’m sure is pretty famous now within the various blogging/t’Internet circles.

The Cubic phone, Pirelli Discus DualPhone DP L10, is manufactured by Pirelli, yes the tyre and calendar people (thank God for Pirelli!). Why they have made a WiFi/GSM handset only God knows, but its pretty nice. They have brought the convergence of VoIP to GSM giving you a choice of which medium to use for your telephone calls.

I won’t go into the reviews of the actual handset, as there are reviews available that are infinitely better than I could do. Saying that, the only *bad* thing I will say about the device (and this is more the design of the device and not of Cubic Telecom’s fault) is the audio quality from the device speaker. It seems as if the speaker is set a little too deeply into the handset, and therefore it gives the audio a slightly muffled quality.

Technical specifications of the device are:

Network Connectivity: GSM 900/1800/1900 (Full Tri-band GSM using standard 3GPP) + WiFi VoIP (802.11 b/g) using SIP

Data: GPRS + WiFi Data (on the Cubic phone there is a WAP browser. While WAP is not widely used anymore, it is still available)

Screen: 128×128 pixels, 65K colours

Camera: 0.3 megapixels

Size: Standard candy bar 106×46x18mm / weight not specified

Messaging: SMS, MMS, WAP, E-mail

Mobile setup: OMA/OTAP (Open Mobile Alliance Over The Air Provisioning)

From a technical point of view, the phone is pretty good. The phone supports both open standard VoIP SIP, and 3GPP GSM network connectivity, both open standards and so inter-operable with all networks, unlike Skype.

The possibility of roaming/handover from GSM to WiFi (UMA or GAN) is not possible with the phone, as Pat said, Cubic would need access to the actual mobile network, and also the WiFi network.

In the US, T-Mobile offer an interesting service T-Mobile@Home, where you can use your home WiFi for mobile phone coverage for free, also unlimited access to their other WiFi mobile hotspots, and then your plan minutes when out of WiFi coverage.

Of course, you buy the WiFi router from them so, they get both your WiFi and your cellphone bills.

Setting the phone up on WiFi:

To set-up the phone on your WiFi network is pretty easy:

To connect to wifi:
Menu
Click symbol that looks like “mobile phone Eiffel tower”
Hotspots
Edit active settings
Scan and security
Scan
Find a hotspot
You will see you hotspot
Click save

If you hot spot is open:
Menu
Click symbol that looks like “mobile phone Eiffel tower”
Click “sip status”
You should see sip profile and register server

If your hotspot is closed:
Click symbol that looks like “mobile phone Eiffel tower”
Hotspots
Edit active settings
Scan and security
Security
Enter your WEP/WPA key

Mobile provisioning:
I got it set-up within about 2 minutes when I arrived home. The phone will work with all WiFi networks that are open, or require a WEP/WPA password. I want to try it out with my Fon router to see if this works. If Cubic were able to get this working with Fon WiFi routers(the issue seems to be that Fon “public” SSID requires you to enter your Fon user/pass details into the device. If Cubic were able to get something like aDeviceScape client for this phone, it would be a big help, they would have coverage all over the UK, and other countries.

At the moment I am using it both as a GSM phone, (with my operator SIM inside) and as a WiFi phone. The OMA OTAP really becomes useful when the phone is provisioned as a MaxRoam mobile phone. More of that later.

Up to now, its all pretty standard new technology. Its a GSM mobile phone, with a VoIP client inside.

Cubic VoIP service:
Cubic Telecom are also a SIP registrar, meaning they are a VoIP carrier (with their networks hosted inInterFusion). They give you a geographical dial-in number (mine being +353 1 5262819). Their carrier partners as both traditional hardwired and IP switching, giving them (and effectively the customer) good savings and range of path over which to send the call traffic.

Useful features:
One nice feature is when they provide you with a foreign dial-in number. Pat provided me with a Finnish dial-in number (+358 942 599550).

So, you have a local call number in two countries. Since all the calls are being routed over WiFi (which I am already paying for) and over SIP (through Cubic Telecoms softswitch in Dublin) calls cost nothing.

This is all standard enough technology, done with Asterisk, softswitches and other hardware. Things get interesting when you add Cubic Telecom’s new product MaxRoam - the SIM that doesn’t know you are roaming.

This is really just part 1 of a few parts. Next week, I am going to Helsinki for some work, so I will see how we get on.

[tags] runningwithbulls.com , cubic telecom , maxroam , pat phelan , voip , gsm , mobile , 3gpp [/tags]