3 Mobile Launch Skypephone

3 Mobile have teamed up with Skype to offer free calls across the Internet using their new Skypephone. The Skype network has, within a very short space of time, become hugely popular for making free Internet calls through handsets that are attached to your PC and has built up a large customer base that recently prompted a buyout by eBay. If popular, this brave step by 3 could prompt an end of pay as you talk tariffs and push other mobile phone networks into action to try and offer similar competitive deals.

The new Skypephone from 3 has all the functionality you would expect from a modern day mobile phone including 3G, a 2-megapixel camera, mp3 player, mobile TV and internet plus the handset looks stylish and comes in either black or white with pink or blue trims. The Skypephone includes 16MB internal memory and comes with a 256MB micro SD memory card which is also expandable up to 1GB. The large Skype button in the center of the handset allows for quick and easy access to the Skype menu where you can simply make a free call or write a text message to people within your friends list.

The biggest challenge for the 3 Skypephone is encouraging people who are not already signed up with Skype, or whose friends are not members of Skype, to buy the phone. If this hurdle can be cleared then it could create a domino effect which would push all other mobile phone networks to provide a similar service and may make Skype a major player in the world of telecommunications. Once you are signed up to Skype you will not only be able to call people using the 3 Skypephone but also talk to friends connected to Skype through their PC.

3 Mobile offer the Skypephone on either pay as you go or monthly contract deals. The payg deal currently costs £49.99 for the Skypephone handset and requires you to top up your phone with at least £10 credit for standard voice calls and texts. The contract deals start from £12 per month with a minimum tie-in of 18 months.

The Skype deal from 3 is also available with other compatible mobile phones such as the Nokia N95 or the Sony Ericsson W910i which makes the offer a lot more flexible and doesn’t tie customers to a single handset. For none 3 Mobile customers Skype is also compatible with mobile phones that run the Windows Mobile operating system, plus it is possible to connect to Skype using Fring (a third party mobile VoIP application that enables free mobile internet calls and live chat to other fringsters and PC-based services including Skype, Google Talk, ICQ, MSN Messenger and Twitter) through a mobile phone with the Symbian operating system.

This fantastic offer could help encourage a reduction in prices of mobile phone calls and it is likely that other mobile phone networks will be keeping a close eye on how the collaboration develops. Flexibility is the key and by allowing customers to choose whether they make calls through Skype or through normal network services, the Skypephone should be a huge success.

Cisco CCNA Certification: The (Many) Different Kinds Of Switching

When you're studying for your CCNA exam, whether you're taking the Intro-ICND path or the single-exam path, you're quickly introduced to the fact that switching occurs at Layer 2 of the OSI model. No problem there, but then other terms involving switching are thrown in, and some of them can be more than a little confusing. What is "cell switching"? What is "circuit switching"? Most confusing of all, how can you have "packet switching"? Packets are found at Layer 3, but switching occurs at Layer 2. How can packets be switched?

Relax! As you'll see in this article, the terms aren't that hard to keep straight. Packet switching, for example, describes a protocol that divides a message into packets before they're sent. The packets are then sent individually, and may take different paths to the same destination. Once the packets arrive at the final destination, they are reassembled.

Frame switching follows the same process, but at a different layer of the OSI model. When the protocol runs at Layer 2 rather than Layer 3, the process is referred to as frame switching.

Cell switching also does much the same thing, but as the name implies, the device in use is a cell switch. Cell-switched packets are fixed in length. ATM is a popular cell-switching technology.

The process of circuit switching is just a bit different, in that the process of setting up the circuit itself is part of the process. The channel is set up between two parties, data is transmitted, and the channel is then torn down. The circuit-switching technology most familiar to CCNA candidates is ISDN.

Don't let these terms confuse you. The four different terms are describing much the same process. The main difference is that they are occurring at different levels of the OSI model, and using a different transport method to get the data where it needs to go.