Bell, Telus, Rogers trial inter-carrier video calling
By Chris Ziegler 
posted February 24th 2010 4:28PM
posted February 24th 2010 4:28PM
Even as American carriers continue to resist it, a variety of Canada's GSM networks support video calling on so-enabled 3G handsets -- but currently, the problem is that you're only able to video call other phones on the same network. Fortunately, Rogers, Bell, and Telus have been hard at work playing nice long enough to ensure that their respective video calling services play nice one another, and they've just announced the successful completion of inter-carrier trials. The companies are quick to point out that this makes them the "first inter-carrier partnership in North America" to support 3GPP-compliant video calling, something that should hopefully make AT&T and T-Mobile feel at least a fleeting moment of shame. No word on exactly when the service will be available to end users.
Europe and Asia has had two-way 3G calling for over 8 years now. Our carriers are still focused on finding new ways to offer 'unlimited plans' and how to lock down a handset even more.
@JKL = fail.
_VIDEO_ calling.
its funny how they are trying to reinvent stuff you could easly do with proper skype support.
@MrN1ce Just what I was thinking. There is no critical mass to make this work anyways, but it would be great to support Skype to connect with people who are using their PCs. The latency would be pretty bad though, so the ultimate would be to use the PSTN for voice, and Skype for video, so that the video is high latency but the audio is not.
Unfortunately there are no plans currently available for viDeo calling. On Rogers it costs 35 cents a minute to video call.
With AT&T whining about their capacity already being at limits I highly doubt we will see video calling anytime soon.