Wireless Carriers To Adopt New Real-Time Text Protocol By December 2017 (engadget.com) 28
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The FCC is ready to adopt a proposal that'll bring a new protocol to wireless networks to help people with disabilities communicate. It's called real-time text (RTT) and will be a replacement for the aging teletypewriter devices that let users transmit text conversations over traditional phone lines. According to the FCC's statement, RTT will "allow Americans who are deaf, hard of hearing, speech disabled or deaf-blind to use the same wireless communications devices as their friends, relatives and colleagues, and more seamlessly integrate into tomorrow's communications networks." The big differentiator for RTT over current, commonly-used text-based messaging systems is that RTT messages are sent immediately as they're typed. The RTT technology will let text users communicate with people on voice-based phones and vice versa; it can also work easily in your standard smartphone, eliminating the need for specialized equipment. The proposal calls for RTT to roll out over wireless networks run by "larger carriers" by December of 2017.
Interesting (Score:2)
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I'm curious if we'll see new stand-alone TDD/TTY devices (that have a SIM slot instead of a phone jack on them), or perhaps wireless carriers will just do a web-based gateway service instead (log into your account on your carrier's website, enter a destination number, and once the connection is made type away in the input area).
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I'm curious if we'll see new stand-alone TDD/TTY devices
I'm sure we will. Because that way the manufacturers can rely on FDA regulations to keep the market to themselves and jack up prices.
Like the touch pad speech generating devices used by people with ALS which, in theory, could be replaced by a cheap tablet app. But nope. Can't do that because the moment it becomes an assisitive device, the manufacturer has to jump through FDA approval hoops.
Ditto. (Score:2)
I tried TDD/TTY when I was a teen back in the early 90s. It was interesting, but I didn't like it compared to dial-up BBSes and Internet. I also did not want to use a third party to talk to people on the other end who didn't have TTY/TDD services for privacy reasons and I use a lot of technical terms. I recently checked to see things improved for Internet and smartphones, nope. I will stick with IMs, IRC, textings, e-mails, real-time chat, etc.
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Also, I don't like how we can't do TDD/TTY with smartphones and Internet directly. Why have those old school devices? Argh.
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Funny, my company spent (several years ago when we did smartphones) a lot of time and effort getting TDD/TTY devices working with them. Not because we wanted to, but it was a carrier requirement for our customers. Admittedly, it was basically a device that hooked into the headset jack of the phone and transmitted tones over it. Now, the network doesn't transmit the tones directly I'm le
Telnet (Score:2)
If your backbone is 64K dial up (Score:2)
If you're shared medium, your office backbone, is a dial up connection then yes, small messages are inefficient.
In the US, dozens of packets from a user using this protocol are nothing compared to the billions of packets used by an HD video stream.
The other way around is much bigger problem. High bandwidth connections with lots of traffic means a lot of big queues. Queues murder latency and jitter. Telcos can and do use a lot of processing to try to speed the few latency-sensitive packets through the sea
RTT messages are sent immediately as they're typed (Score:2)
This is really, really old technology.
VAX PHONE did this 37 years ago, and I'm sure that RSTS and other PDP-11 OSs had something similar.
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Lots of really old technologies haven't been rolled out as ubiquitous standards yet.
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My thoughts immediately jumped to RFC1459 - Good ol' Internet Relay Chat. There's been plenty of instant messenger applications over the years.
I don't quite see the advantage of "real time" though - watching someone type is boring, and they (or at least I) often go back and edit to fix typos or choose a different wording. One of the advantages to text is you can do that before committing.
=Smidge=
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I don't quite see the advantage of "real time" though
It's easier than the IM prog printing "John Doe is typing a message". Also, people used to TTY/TTD are used to it, and probably don't want it changed.
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As long as it doesn't replace SMS, or gives the option of manual commit, we'll be ok. Otherwise, I'd agree with the GP's comment about the edit before commit issue. As I don't want Siri auto-correcting "piano" to "penis" in my automatically sent text as "I" type it.....
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I don't quite see the advantage of "real time" though - watching someone type is boring, and they (or at least I) often go back and edit to the fix typos or choose a different wording.
It's been a couple decades, so I don't remember if it was the old command-line "talk" or something else, but - we used to take advantage of the real time transmission feature all the time to make jokes and tweak the people we were chatting with.
Dead on arrival (Score:2)
In most countries, people don't use sms that often due to exhorbitant prices, WhatsApp and others have jumped in. Now, after the Snowden leaks, it's not interesting because it's unencrypted. Most decent messengers have now added end to end encryption.
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So we get ripped on the data prices in the US but we have unlimited texting and thats somehow unusual?
Technical documentation? (Score:2)
A new protocol to send text (Score:3)
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This is more like the old Unix talk program. Every key you type gets sent as you type it. The recipient can watch the other person type, including correcting mistakes. It doesn't have the "I'll get to it when I have time" nature of SMS, email, etc. where you can just ignore an incoming message and reply to it later. It's more interactive, and real-time - like a phone call. Which is why it's
This is an important story (Score:3)
It's so important, I'm hoping it gets posted again soon so it stays fresh in everybody's mind.