GSM gateways in the US?!?

Sun Jul 24 23:57:47 UTC 2005

I've heard rumors that some cell providers have a solution for corperate 
campus enviroments... essentially where there is a private cell site or 
something along those lines.  I think cingular has a product along those 
lines.  Can anybody confirm?  I've only heard this as we drecently 
re-did our phone system and the sales people were trying to sell us on 
everything under the sun.

-Justin Kreger

On Sun, 24 Jul 2005, Jon Lewis wrote:

>
> 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.
>
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