The WiFi Cell Phone
It's Take-off Time for Cell Phones that Transmit a WiFi Signal
There's a WiFi cell phone in your future. WiFi will shortly be a standard feature of all cell phones. Cell phone manufacturers are lining up to have their products accredited under the Wi-Fi Certified Voice-Personal program and to date nearly 200 devices have received the tick.
The program enables users to make consistently high quality calls with the convenience expected from VoIP and data over WiFi applications. Using the technology is simple. It's a case of turning on a WiFi phone, associating it with an access point and registering with a VoIP service provider.
VoWiFi (Voice over WiFi) is the next big thing in personal and business communications. The technology is young, but it's also stable and reliable. Enthusiasm for WiFi is gathering at a pace. In it's current form voice over WiFi is most appropriate for personal and small business use. That is about to change as enterprise versions of the 802.11 find their way into the market during 2010.
Enterprise WiFi will support handoffs across multiple access points. It will enable voice calls to remain active without interruption as users move about the area served by the access points.
WiFi cell phones are capable of interacting with VoIP in a multitude of ways. Some of the mechanisms can be controlled by the cell phone carriers and others can't. Naturally there is some apprehension on behalf of the carriers and as a consequence the phone manufacturers are sensitive to their concerns. After all the carriers are their major channel to market.
Get an Unlimited World calling subscription from Skype.
On the other hand, consumers have demonstrated an enormous appetite for dual mode cell phones such as the iPhone and Blackberry. Eventually consumer demand will force the cell phone carriers to be creative. They will need to offer plans that allow personal and business users to tap into the economies and convenience of voice over WiFi from their dual-mode WiFi cell phones. The virtual or Online number
is here to stay.
The barbarians are storming the gates and the cell phone carriers look to be panicking. If anyone doubts that the carriers are spooked by the threat of WiFi consider the Blackberry Storm. Touted as an iPhone killer, but where's the WiFi? RIM knows how to make a WiFi phone, they've done it before. Presumably the company was leaned on by Verizon and Vodafone to omit or remove WiFi from the Storm's specifications. A serious concession by RIM to these powerful channels. It will deter a lot of buyers looking for an alternative to the iPhone 3G, they will now look more closely at Nokia 5800 and the Google HTC Android. Demand for the WiFi cell phone is not going to go away.
A more enlightened approach may have been for Verizon and Vodafone to follow the lead of T-Mobile in offering WiFi roaming as an add-on package to a cell phone plan. They are not going to turn back the tide by ignoring its existence.
Evidently China Mobile established a precedent in haggling with Apple to gut the iPhone 3G and produce a version without either 3G or WiFi for the Chinese market.
Get a Personal Online number
Related Articles
From WiFi Mobile Phone to WiFi Cell Phones
From WiFi Cell Phone to Cordless Phone Update
