In the last 2 years, I have travelled through 22 US States, the Caribbean, UK, France and Spain. In the last three weeks alone, I have clocked up 1000+ miles per week in 3 different countries. During 90% of that time, my phone has been on airplane mode after being hit with substantial bills for roaming charges a couple of years ago. Public WiFi is the answer.
Living without a mobile number is not as tough as it seems as long as there are plenty of places to access wifi.
FMC is really the nirvana where all networks finally converge. We are already experiencing it with internet connectivity – I keep up to date with facebook, twitter (and, ahem, of course work and email) via the internet connection on my mobile phone. We use both WiFi and 3G/GPRS to do this and whilst service can be intermittent it does work and is reasonably ubiquitous.
Convergence of voice over fixed and mobile networks is really the final piece of the jigsaw. Since Timico started selling VoIP services around 5 years ago we have been looking at FMC solutions. These have all been based on WiFi for the mobile piece.
Most of the Timico staff who have been subjected to my technology staff intro presentation, which is practially all 130 of them over the last 4 years, will have had my spiel regarding the competitive benefits of standardisation (eg IBM PC, GSM phones, SIP). Basically standards increase choice and reduce costs.
Our position regarding the support of VoIP handsets has however been very conservative on the basis that it is impossible for a service provider to provide a quality level of support for a huge range of handsets. Actually this applies in the mobile world just as much as in VoIP although to a lesser extent because GSM is a maturer technology.
I have to say though that as SIP becomes seriously mainstream as the signaling protocol of choice for VoIP my attitude towards handset support is changing. This is bolstered by the availability of a wider range of quality products from market leaders such as Nortel, Cisco and Polycom.
The picture below shows the handsets that we have either already been providing or are in test for production in the near future.
Its horses for courses.