GSM gateways in the US?!?

Sun Jul 24 23:52:49 UTC 2005

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005, John Levine wrote:

>> ... not inside the [same provider's] mobile network, cell phone to
>> cell phone. See T-Mobile's "Unlimited Mobile-to-Mobile" component of
>> their services, as an example. This (unlimited, for a flat, usually
>> minuscule, fee) is what I am hoping to achieve with a gateway (making
>> the PBX behind it look like any other mobile phone).
>
> I don't understand where you're planning to save money here.  Calls
> into a mobile network are free for the caller under any circumstances.

I've recently been thinking about the same thing, so I think I get it.

Suppose you have a staff of people with CarrierX cell phones, and CX 
offers free calling within their network.  So all your staff can call each 
other's CX cell phones from their own CX cell phones at no cost above the 
regular flat monthly fee.  Now, suppose your office regularly needs to 
call those cell phones.  Sure, calling from your LEC lines doesn't cost 
you anything, but it burns up the callee's limited cell<->pstn minutes. 
If you could somehow interface your PBX to the CX network and place calls 
into the CX network without burning up callee minutes, that could 
potentially save you considerable money.  Assuming CX won't allow you to 
actually interconnect with them in the "normal" way phone networks 
interconnect, you could perhaps do so by interfacing CX cell phones (or 
something that would look like them to CX) to your PBX.

> If, nonetheless, you want to experiment with this kind of hack, look
> for devices with names like cellsocket and dock-n-talk that take a
> cell phone and provide a landline interface that you should be able
> to connect to a PBX.

Cellsocket sounds familiar...I think I have a friend using one of those to 
provide a phone line to his personal asterisk server.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                | 
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