Gallery

Wireless operator

Posted on 26 Oct 2006 at 11:22

Paul Ockenden tries to make some sense of the confused world of Wi-Fi, and configures his new nokia e61 to run voip

I've just received some rather stylish Draft-N products from Belkin, and it will be interesting to see whether the problem lies in Draft-N itself or the way companies like Netgear have deployed it. Maybe being later to market, the Belkin kit will have some of the problems ironed out. I'll be sure to let you know over the coming months.

But let's take a reality check: does any of this really matter? In the real world, most people will be connecting wirelessly from a laptop, and most laptops already have a wireless card built in, most likely 802.11g for domestic kit and dual-mode 802.11a/g for enterprise-class machines (for some reason, 802.11a seems only to have taken off in large corporations). The built-in wireless in a laptop will have no MIMO, no speed- boosting technology and no trace of Draft-N, so the only way to go faster is by plugging in a PC Card. But do you really want to plug in a card when there's already one built into your laptop? Do you want a chunk of plastic sticking out of the side? Do you want another device sucking life out of your battery? Will you pay extra for a new card when the one you have works well enough? Chances are your answers will be no, no, no and no. The time to start thinking about 802.11n routers is when laptops start to come with internal 802.11n cards.

I SIP my tea

I've recently been playing with Nokia's E61 "BlackBerry killer" smartphone. It's an excellent mobile comms tool; Nokia has push clients available for most of the popular systems out there, and the web browser is brilliant. It coped well with just about every web-enabled business tool and intranet I tried.

I've had a couple of E61s here, testing various push-email clients like BlackBerry Connect and Good Mobile Messaging - more about that in a later column. But while I had the phones, I thought I'd check out what else they can do, and buried within the options I found setup screens for Internet Telephony. Yup, right out of the box it comes with Voice over IP (VoIP), and what's more it's to the open SIP standard, which makes a nice change from devices that force you to use a proprietary system like Skype. The beauty of having a SIP client on your mobile, especially a Wi-Fi-enabled mobile, is that not only can you make cheap calls by completely bypassing your mobile network operator, but you can also receive calls anywhere in the world on a geographic-UK number.

I've got a couple of test accounts with Sipgate (www.sipgate.co.uk), which is neither the cheapest nor the most reliable of VoIP providers - I've known it to go down on Friday evening and not be fixed until the following Monday morning - but it does allow you to set up an incoming number for free, and that's useful when testing new devices. I went through various option screens on the E61 and set up my Sipgate account details, but I kept seeing "unable to register" messages. After ages trying different usernames and passwords, finally the penny dropped - I hadn't seen any STUN setup screen on the Nokia. Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol Through Network Address Translators, or STUN, is a mechanism that allows VoIP and other services to work behind a NATed connection, as found in pretty much all wireless routers. Most VoIP software and hardware includes support for STUN, but it's nowhere to be found on the E61 - a surprising omission given its otherwise excellent facilities. For the VoIP client to work, the Nokia would