My new goal: Building my ideal phone service.
My communication module is long overdue for an overhaul. this is going on the to do list.
Instead of shelling out $40 a month for a basic cell phone plan, in my third year in college I bought my first smartphone (unlocked), and set up google voice over a free sip provider. This was the concept of VoIP applied as benign hack of the service, a work around that google later shut down until completing their own paid service using this same idea. I could make and receive calls only over WiFi. I had WiFi at work and at home, and coffee shops all along the way. It worked beautifully... For texting. Voice calls were a bit tougher, depending heavily on the range and strength in the signal. My friends hated calling me there was often an echo, and a bad delay; a conversation killer. I kept it up for far too long until moving to a new city, which i decided i needed to get back on a regular cell plan. While trying to build new roots, self limitation like this could become a self crippling.
I find the state of the cell phone market to be rather parasitic dark cloud in 2019. So many options, but most of the market it designed around mining as much data from users on every single layer of the system. I don't like the ways it interferes with my desire to communicate, so clearly it's time for a new approach.
Internet speeds have increased practically every where and I would be curious at looking at this approach again practically a decade later and see what the possibilities are now. I'm curious what it would take to run my own sip service and how difficult that would be? Maybe my own service is unnecessary in practicality, first I would need to learn more about encryption within a deployed service.
On a search for alternatives i came across this article to building a cell phone from scratch. While I probably won't be building this right now, it seems like a really fun project for the future. The lack of texting options might make it a hard sell, but I love how simple it is. What a beautiful device which teaches us the basics of this new limb that the human race has grown! 🙄 Check it out:
https://www.instructables.com/id/Make-your-own-cellphone-from-scratch/
this photo is public domain.
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check out this new project @phonedata Soon allowing steemians to Buy Vodaphone Data with a steem engine token , like mcsamm and @anaman used to have going for just steem
Here is the Discord https://discord.gg/ZqKUAvN
https://steemit.com/promo-steem/@mcsamm/introducing-vodafone-internet-data-to-steemians
$40 is more than enough to pay for TV, Internet and a Mobile plan for a month... you guys are getting exploited.
Congratulations on being featured by @chekohler in an entry for the Pay It Forward Contest
I think it would be really cool if we started building our own infrastructure and started to decentralise things and reduce dependency on corporates but I doubt they would allow us to weasle on this money printing industry.
FYI i've also nominated your post as my @pifc post of the week. You can find my nomination post here. Feel free to join us each week in curating cool posts from new authors each week
Sounds really interesting!
When I returned to the USA from Britain, I was really shocked at how much cell phone plans cost here.
Anyway... I found you because @chekohler featured you in the Pay it Forward Curation Contest. Keep up the great work!
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Hey, I get where you're coming from! It's impressive how you found creative ways to manage communication while in college. 😄 But yeah, with all the data mining and limitations in the cell phone market, it's time for a fresh approach. switching to business phone service might offer the reliability you need without compromising your privacy. As for running your own SIP service, it could be an exciting learning experience! Who knows, maybe it'll become your future project.