VOIP over Bluetooth instead of 802.11

[Fritzinger]

I'm looking into creating a VOIP client which will transmit voice data over Bluetooth rather than over 802.11. The question is:

Does the S40 VOIP API on for instance the 6300i give you control that is low-level enough to redirect traffic over Bluetooth?

I know that the API would not have been implemented on the device if it did not support one of 3G or Wifi. There is genuinely a reason as to why I would prefer to use Bluetooth than Wifi and 3G, so I'm not particularly interested in answers that say, "why bother - just use Wifi". Rather tell me it's not possible .

I am fully expecting to have to do a lot of programming to achieve this. I don't mind if it's hard, I just don't want to spend time on something impossible.

Thanks,
Fritz

[epollari]

I'm looking into creating a VOIP client which will transmit voice data over Bluetooth rather than over 802.11. The question is:

Does the S40 VOIP API on for instance the 6300i give you control that is low-level enough to redirect traffic over Bluetooth?

I know that the API would not have been implemented on the device if it did not support one of 3G or Wifi. There is genuinely a reason as to why I would prefer to use Bluetooth than Wifi and 3G, so I'm not particularly interested in answers that say, "why bother - just use Wifi". Rather tell me it's not possible .

I am fully expecting to have to do a lot of programming to achieve this. I don't mind if it's hard, I just don't want to spend time on something impossible.

Thanks,
Fritz

You'd want to use the Bluetooth PAN or CTP profile, both of which are lacking from the handsets. SPP will suck your battery dry in no time.

I find the price of Bluetooth APs prohibitive, especially compared to WiFi APs. Why bother?

BR,
Esa

[Fritzinger]

You'd want to use the Bluetooth PAN or CTP profile, both of which are lacking from the handsets. SPP will suck your battery dry in no time.

I find the price of Bluetooth APs prohibitive, especially compared to WiFi APs. Why bother?

BR,
Esa

Thanks for the response! I'll read up on those acronyms and come back when I understand more.

The 'why bother' is that I'm in the field of ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development), which can be explained as making technology more useful to poor people. I live in South Africa, where millions of poor people own cellphones (at least 13m), but they often cannot afford to use them for normal network use. These cellphones don't have wifi, but many do have Bluetooth.

What I'm looking at is a way to increase the usefulness of technology that is already in the hands of ordinary people, without making it cost more.

Where this gets exciting is the Village Telco concept (see villagetelco.org). If you look at the site you'll see they have developed something called the Mesh Potato, which is a low cost self-contained mesh node that is capable of carrying voice and data. If that can be adapted to include a Bluetooth radio, then you just have to get people into Bluetooth range of the Potato device, and they'll be able to make calls using their own handsets to anywhere else on the network.

It's the killer app for existing technology, if it can be done... which it seems it probably can't .

Regards,
Fritz

[Fritzinger]

A question: if SPP is the only supported Bluetooth profile does that mean I would only have access to RFCOMM and not to the underlying L2CAP connection?

It's my understanding that reliable, ordered protocols are not great for VOIP, hence without L2CAP I would struggle.

Major battery usage may be not be as much of a problem.

Fritz

Thanks for the response! I'll read up on those acronyms and come back when I understand more.

The 'why bother' is that I'm in the field of ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development), which can be explained as making technology more useful to poor people. I live in South Africa, where millions of poor people own cellphones (at least 13m), but they often cannot afford to use them for normal network use. These cellphones don't have wifi, but many do have Bluetooth.

What I'm looking at is a way to increase the usefulness of technology that is already in the hands of ordinary people, without making it cost more.

Where this gets exciting is the Village Telco concept (see villagetelco.org). If you look at the site you'll see they have developed something called the Mesh Potato, which is a low cost self-contained mesh node that is capable of carrying voice and data. If that can be adapted to include a Bluetooth radio, then you just have to get people into Bluetooth range of the Potato device, and they'll be able to make calls using their own handsets to anywhere else on the network.

It's the killer app for existing technology, if it can be done... which it seems it probably can't .

Regards,
Fritz

[sudude]

According to the public Forum Nokia information the Series40 device you refere to, 6300i, only has built in SIP VoIP support that you can configure according to http://www.forum.nokia.com/Tools_Doc...ramework.xhtml documentation which does not speak of anything else than WiFi as connection choise. So what is this S40 VOIP API you refer to ?

[Fritzinger]

According to the public Forum Nokia information the Series40 device you refere to, 6300i, only has built in SIP VoIP support that you can configure according to http://www.forum.nokia.com/Tools_Doc...ramework.xhtml documentation which does not speak of anything else than WiFi as connection choise. So what is this S40 VOIP API you refer to ?

The publicity material I saw at the time gave me the impression that this was an API that could be programmatically manipulated to do interesting things, like substituting a Bluetooth connection for a wifi connection. It doesn't mention Bluetooth because the usefulness would only be in certain very narrow contexts. I was prepared to write the code to make that happen for my own narrow context. Given any rational design this should actually be very easy to do. Substituting one transport layer for another is hardly rocket science.

[nikitogt]

Thanks for the response! I'll read up on those acronyms and come back when I understand more.

The 'why bother' is that I'm in the field of ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development), which can be explained as making technology more useful to poor people. I live in South Africa, where millions of poor people own cellphones (at least 13m), but they often cannot afford to use them for normal network use. These cellphones don't have wifi, but many do have Bluetooth.

What I'm looking at is a way to increase the usefulness of technology that is already in the hands of ordinary people, without making it cost more.

Where this gets exciting is the Village Telco concept (see villagetelco.org). If you look at the site you'll see they have developed something called the Mesh Potato, which is a low cost self-contained mesh node that is capable of carrying voice and data. If that can be adapted to include a Bluetooth radio, then you just have to get people into Bluetooth range of the Potato device, and they'll be able to make calls using their own handsets to anywhere else on the network.

It's the killer app for existing technology, if it can be done... which it seems it probably can't .

Regards,
Fritz

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Hello.

I live in Guatemala and I share completely the Fritz's goal idea.

And I don't understand why there are guys that don't like challenges. Why don't dare to make changes? Conformism?

If Fritz arrives to get his BT App for voip really we here in this country could use it for the same aims Fritz expose.

Good luck Fritz and expect to have new from your project. Unfortunately I'm not software developper to argument technical issues.


Best regards.

MG